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A WINTER 



CONTENT 



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LAURA LEE DAVIDSON 




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'through patches of snow 



A Winter of Content 



By 
LAURA LEE DAVIDSON 



"j;V*ow there is a rocky isle in the mid 

^-^ sea, midway between Ithaca 

and rocky Samos, Asteris, a little isle." 

The Odyssey of Homer, Translated by 
S. S. Butcher and Andrew Lang 



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THE ABINGDON PRESS 

NEW YORK CINCINNATI 



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Copyright, 1922, by 
LAURA LEE DAVIDSON 



Printed in the United Stttes of America 



m 26 1922 
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To 

LOUISE 

The Lady of the Island 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

PAGE 

"Through Patches of Snow" Frontispiece 

"Peter, the Rabbit, Is Turning White Very 

Rapidly" 53 

The House 82 

A Point of One of the Islands 97 

"The Heavy Woodsleds Still Travel Down 

the Lakes" 131 

"The Drapeaus Live on a Long Peninsula to 

the West of This Island" 155 



CHAPTER I 

A SMALL, rocky island in a lake, a canoe 
paddling away across the blue water, a woman 
standing on a narrow strip of beach, looking 
after it. I was the woman left on the shore, 
the canoe held my companions of the past 
summer, the island was to be my home until 
another summer should bring them back 
again. 

There is no denying that I was frightened 
as I turned back along the trail toward the 
little house among the birches. It was hard 
work to keep from jumping into a boat and 
putting out after the canoe that was round- 
ing the point and leaving me alone. 

Little chilly fears laid icy fingers on the 
back of my neck. A shadow slipped between 
the trees; a sigh whispered among the leaves. 
I wanted to see all round me; I wanted to 
put my back against a wall. A little, grin- 
ning goblin of a misgiving stuck out an im- 
pudent tongue as it quoted some of the jeers 
of unsympathetic friends and relatives, who 
had derided my plan for borrowing the camp, 

7 



8 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

when summer was gone, and staying on alone 
at the Lake of Many Islands. 

"Good-by," had smiled my sister. "You 
say you mean to stay a year, but you'll tire 
of solitude long before the winter. We'll 
see you back at Thanksgiving." 

It was only mid-September, but I wanted 
to see her then at that very instant. 

There had been a farewell dinner, the 
family assembled, to prophesy disaster. 

"You'll freeze your nose and ears off," 
mourned a reassuring aunt. 

In vain I reminded her that no inhabitant 
seen in five summers' sojourn at the lake had 
been without a nose or ears ; all had had the 
requisite number of features, although some 
of those same features had withstood the cold 
of well-nigh a hundred winters. But she was 
not consoled, and continued to regard me so 
tearfully that I felt sure that she was bidding 
farewell to my nose. 

"You'll break a leg and lie for days before 
anyone knows you are hurt," said Cousin 
John. 

"You'll be snowed in and no one will find 
you until spring," said Brother Henry. 

"You are a city woman and not strong. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 9 

What do you know of a pioneer's life? It 
is the most foolish plan we ever heard of," 
chorused all. 

Descending from prophecy to argument, 
they continued: 

"Of course you will have a telephone." 

"That I will not," I answered. "I have 
been jerked at the end of a telephone wire for 
years. I want rest." 

"At least you will have a good dog. That 
will be some protection." 

"A dog would drive away all the wild 
things. I want to study them," I objected. 

"Then, for mercy's sake, find some other 
woman to stay there with you. Surely there 
is another lunatic willing to freeze to death 
on the precious island. You should have a 
companion, if only to send for help." 

"I don't want a companion," I protested, 
tearfully. "I won't be responsible for another 
person's comfort or safety. I will do this 
thing alone or not at all." 

"I am tired to death," I stormed. "I need 
rest for at least one year. I want to watch 
the procession of the seasons in some place 
that is not all paved streets, city smells and 
noise. Instead of the clang of car bells and 



lo A WINTER OF CONTENT 

the honk of automobile horns, I want to hear 
the winds sing across the ice fields, instead of 
the smell of asphalt and hot gasoline, I want 
the odor of wet earth in boggy places. I have 
loved the woods all my life, I long to see the 
year go round there just once before I die." 

At which outburst they shrugged exasper- 
ated shoulders and were silent, but each one 
drew me aside, at parting, and pressed a gift 
into my hand. 

"Be sure to let us know if anything goes 
wrong. Write to us if you need the least 
thing. Don't be ashamed to come back, if 
the experiment proves a failure" — and so on 
and so on, God bless them! 

Of all this the bogy reminded me as he 
danced ahead up the winding trail. 

The house looked lonely, even in the bright- 
ness of the late afternoon. I hurried supper, 
to be indoors before the twilight fell. Big 
Canadian hares hopped along the paths and 
sat at the kitchen door, their great eyes peer- 
ing, long, furry ears alert, quivering noses 
pressed against the wire screen. Grouse 
pecked on the hill side, as tame as barnyard 
fowl. From the water came the evening call 
of the loons. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT ii 

The scant meal finished, I ran across the 
platform from the kitchen to the main house 
and locked up. Somehow, I did not want 
any open doors behind me that evening. Then 
I loaded the pistol and laid it on a shelf at the 
head of the bed, along with the Bible and 
the Prayer Book. If any marauder could 
know how dreadfully afraid I am of that 
pistol, he would do his marauding with a quiet 
mind. I never expect to touch that weapon. 
It shall be cleaned and oiled when any of the 
men come over from the mainland, but han- 
dle it — never! I would not fire it for a king- 
dom. 

While it was still light I climbed into bed, 
and lay down rigid, with tight-shut eyes, try- 
ing to pretend I did not hear all the rustling, 
creaking, snapping noises in the woods. 
Heavy animals pushed through the fallen 
leaves. Something that sounded as large as a 
moose went crashing through the dry bushes. 

"A rabbit," I whispered to myself. 

Creatures surely as large as bears rushed 
through the underbrush. 

"Grouse," I tried to believe. 

From the lake came stealthy sounds. 

"Driftwood pounding against the rocks, not 



12 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

really oars," I murmured to my thumping 
heart. 

Then light, pattering footsteps on the 
porch. 

In desperation I raised my head and looked 
out. It was a little red fox, trotting busily 
along, snuffling softly as he went. I lay down 
and closed my eyes firmly, determined not to 
open them again no matter what might hap- 
pen, then must have dozed, for, suddenly I 
was aware of a light that flooded all the room. 

There through the northeast window, large 
and round and beautiful, shone the moon, the 
great Moon of the Falling Leaves. It was 
like the sudden meeting with a friend, reas- 
suring, comforting. A broad band of light 
lay across my breast like a kind arm thrown 
over me. The path of the moonbeams on the 
water seemed the road to some safe haven. 
With the moon's calm face looking in and 
the soft lapping of the waves as lullaby, I 
fell asleep — and lo! it was day. 

This house, the living room of the camp, 
that is to be my home for the coming winter, 
stands on a bluff overhanging the lake. It is 
a one-room shack, 16x20 feet, surrounded 
by an eight-foot porch. It is one-storied, 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 13 

shingled, the porch roof upheld by birch log 
pillars, beautiful still clothed in their silvery 
bark. There are eight windows, two in each 
corner, and through some of them the sun is 
always shining. 

Adjoining this main shack and connected 
with it by an uncovered platform are the 
kitchen and storeroom, but these will not be 
used in winter. The stores and I will have 
to stay in the big house if we are not to freeze. 

From these buildings little trails run off 
through the woods to the dock, the pump, the 
summer sleeping shacks, and a path goes all 
round the island close to the shore. Away 
from these beaten tracks are all sorts of hid- 
den nooks and lovely, dim seclusions. 

This little rocky island, one of scores that 
dot the face of the lake, is all a tangle of ferns 
and vines and wildflowers. It is thickly 
wooded with white birch, poplar and wild 
cherry. There are also oaks, maples, pines, 
and great clumps of basswood, and innumer- 
able little cedars are pushing up everywhere. 

Making a way through the overgrown 
paths in the early morning, I break through 
myriads of spiderwebs, stretched across from 
bushes heavy with dew. They feel like the 



14 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

tiniest of fairy fingers brushing my cheek, 
and laid on my eyelids, light as the memory 
of a caress. Butterflies dressed in black vel- 
vet, with white satin frills and sapphire 
jewels, flutter on ahead, and the stems of the 
birches are seen through a gold-green glow, 
like sunlight shining through clear water. 
When I sit on the sandy bottom, with the 
whole lake for my washpot, small fishes, 
wearing coral buttons and jade green ruffles 
on fins and tails, bump their blunt noses 
against my knees. 

Sounds from the mainland come across the 
lake, blurred and indistinct. On the island 
I hear only the wind in the trees, the water 
beating against the stones, and the hum of 
many insect wings. 

There is something queer about the island. 
I am convinced that it stands on some mag- 
netic pole or other, that puts every clock and 
watch out of order as soon as it is landed here. 
Cheap or fine, every timepiece breaks a main- 
spring, and then we fall back on the sundial 
to tell us what's o'clock. We can always know 
when it is noon, provided the weather be 
sunny. When it is cloudy we guess at the 
time and wait for the next fine day. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 15 

This sundial stands in a clearing beside the 
house, and bears for its motto, not the high- 
sounding Latin quotation that seems to belong 
to sundials, but the trite assertion, "Time is 
valuable." A statement wholly untrue, so far 
as this present life of mine is concerned. A 
fine bass, now, or a tin of beans perhaps is 
valuable, but surely not time, in a place where 
there is nothing to do but eat, sleep, and think. 

Yet when I stood to-day, on this lonely bit 
of land, in the midst of an empty lake, wait- 
ing for the shadow to travel to the mark, I 
seemed to catch, for one fleeting instant, some 
idea of the terrible, inexorable passing of the 
hours. 

"Set thy house in order, set thy house in or- 
der," something seemed to say, "for never, 
for thee, shall the shadow turn back upon the 
dial," In that moment I stood alone in space, 
on this old clock the earth, swinging with the 
whirling of the spheres. 

The lake too has its mystery, a strange light 
that shines from the point of one of the 
islands. No one lives on that land; there is 
no farmhouse near it on the shore, nor is it in 
line with any dwelling whose light could seem 
to glimmer from its point. The flare is too 



i6 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

high and too steady for fox-fire, the glow that 
comes from rotting wood, and though men 
say they have explored the place repeatedly, 
there has never been any sign of a campfire 
there. But every now and again that light 
shines by night, like a beacon, and no one has 
ever explained it. 

Perhaps it is the phantom of the council 
fire, round which the red warriors sat in the 
days when this land was theirs. For there 
were Indians hereabout, and not so very long 
ago; and people on the mainland tell of a 
great fight that raged here when a band of the 
Mississagua Nation, led by the chief White 
Eagle, fought with an invading war party 
and of a day of battle from dawn until the 
going down of the sun when the lake was red 
with blood. On the sheer face of the cliff of 
the opposite island are red veinings in the 
rock. If one pretends very hard, they are 
pictures of two war canoes left there by some 
artist of the tribe. The people here believe 
in them devoutly. 

"They were painted in blood," they say. 

A very indelible blood it must have been, 
for those tracings have withstood the wash of 
high water for many a year. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 17 

Whether the picture writing is genuine or 
no, there is plenty of evidence that Indians 
lived along the shores of Many Islands, and 
there is a pretty story told of the wedding of 
a girl, White Eagle's daughter, to a young 
brave of her tribe. The Indians came down 
the lakes and through the portages to Queens- 
port, in their fine canoes, and the lovers were 
married there by the priest at the mission. 
Afterward they were all entertained at dinner 
by the big-hearted wife of the principal mer- 
chant of the town. That lady's daughter tells 
me that for many seasons thereafter the chief's 
daughter would bring or send beautiful birch 
baskets, filled with berries or maple sugar for 
the children of her hostess. 

The bride is described as slim and young, 
with big, dark eyes. The wedding dress was 
dark blue cloth, trimmed with new-minted 
five- and ten-cent pieces, pierced and sewed 
on in a pattern — this worn over a vest of buck- 
skin, beautifully embroidered. 

What became of you, little Indian Bride, 
girl of the grateful heart? Were you happy 
here at Many Islands, or was it life-blood of 
your brave that helped to redden all the 
waters? Did you move back and back with 



1 8 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

your wandering people, or are you lying un- 
der the cedars on some green slope of the 
shore? I shall never know, but I shall think 
of you and wonder. 

There are no Indians here now, except one 
old squaw, who lives far back on the road 
to Maskinonge and tans buckskins in the fine 
old Indian way, but the plow turns up the 
arrowheads, and once in a while a bowl or 
pipe, proofs that the red men lived and fought 
here. 



CHAPTER II 

The Lake of the Many Islands, long, ir- 
regular, spring-fed, lies in a cup of the rolling 
Ontario farmlands. At the south its waters, 
passing through a narrow strait, widen into 
beautiful Blue Bay. At the north they empty, 
in a series of cascades, into the little river Eau 
Claire. The town of Les Rapides, its saw- 
mill idle, the ten or twelve log houses closed, 
stands at the outlet, a deserted village. The 
eagles soar to and fro over the blue lake; the 
black bass jump; the dore swim. There are 
hundreds of little coves and narrow chan- 
nels — waters forgotten of the foot, where only 
the hum of insect wings and the rattle of the 
kingfisher are heard, and where the heron 
stands sentinel in the marshes and the loons 
have their mud nests on the shores. 

"Crazy as a loon," that is, of all phrases, the 
most libelous. For the loon is the most sensi- 
ble of fowl and possessed of the most distinct 
personality. No other water bird has so di- 
rect and so level a flight. He lays his strong 
body down along the wind, and goes, like a 
bullet, straight to his goal, purposeful, un- 

19 



20 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

swerving. He has three cries, one a high, 
maniac laugh, which is, of course, the reason 
his wits are slandered; then a loud, squeal- 
ing cry, very like the sound of a pig in dis- 
tress; and last a long, yearning call, the sum- 
mons to his mate, perhaps, that he sends out 
far across the water — a cry that seems the 
very voice of the wilderness. At twilight, and 
often in the night, I hear that lonely cry, 
echoing down the lakes, and the faint, far cry 
that answers it. 

"There will be wind to-night," the weather- 
wise say. "Hear the loons making a noise." 

The birds come to the bay back of the 
island, and swim about there as friendly as 
puddle ducks. If I go too close, closer than 
Mr. Gavia Immer thinks safe or respectful, 
down he goes and stays for some minutes un- 
der the water, to emerge far away, and in 
quite a different quarter from the one in which 
I expected to see him. No one on earth could 
ever predict where a loon will come up w^hen 
he dives. He looks at me austerely, twisting 
his black head back on his shoulder, until 
I would swear he had turned it completely 
round on his white-ringed neck. Then he 
gives his crazy laugh and disappears again. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 21 

The loon is protected in Canada. No one 
may shoot him or molest him. But once in a 
while one comes across a boat cushion made 
of a bird skin, its gray and white feathers very 
soft and thick and attached to the skin so fast 
that it is well-nigh impossible to pluck them. 
That is the breast of the loon, the great wild 
bird of the northern lakes, that the game law 
has failed to save. When I see one of these 
skins I hate the vandal who has killed the 
bird. 

The Blakes are my nearest neighbors — not 
nearest geographically, for the Drapeau farm 
lies closer to the island; but near by reason of 
their many friendly acts and kind suggestions. 
If I am ill or in trouble, it is to Henry and 
Mary Blake that I shall go for help. 

Henry Blake of the keen, ice-blue eye, the 
caustic tongue and the good heart. There was 
never anything more scathing than his con- 
demnation of the shiftlessness and, what he 
considers the general imbecility of his neigh^ 
bors, and never anything kinder than his will- 
ingness to help one of them in a crisis. He 
will sit for an hour, pencil in hand, laboring 
to explain to some unsuccessful farmer that 
wood hauled at next to nothing a cord can 



22 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

only land the hauler in a ditch of debt, and 
when the hapless one has departed, fully de- 
termined to go his own way, to hear Henry 
spit out the one word, "Fat-head," as he turns 
back to his book, is a lesson in the nice choice 
of epithet. 

When it comes to judgment on the manners, 
the morals, and the methods of their neigh- 
bors Henry and Mary Blake sit in the seats of 
the scornful ; but, after all, they are somewhat 
justified, for they came over from "The 
States." Henry, an invalid, bought a run- 
down island farm, and they have brought it to 
a good state of cultivation and paid ofif their 
mortgage, all in ten years. 

But while they are free in their criticisms 
of the natives, who live from hand to mouth, 
one notices that the Blakes are always willing 
to do a good turn, and are usually being asked 
to do one. Is a house to be built? Henry is 
called on to plan it. Does a churn spring a 
leak, or a cow fall ill? Mary goes to the res- 
cue. Does a temperamental seed-drill choke 
in one of its sixty odd pipes? Henry is sent 
for to find the seat of the disorder and to apply 
the remedy. 

I also went to him, when deliberating the 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 23 

relative cost of a log house and one of board. 
Mr. Blake discussed the matter with me in 
the kindest way, summing up his advice in a 
sentence, that reached my muddled brain in 
some such statement as the following: 

"It all comes to this. You can get one cedar 
log, 6x14 for twenty cents. Three goes into 
twenty-one seven times, so board or log, it 
would come to the same thing." 

It wasn't what he said, of course, but I 
hastened to agree, lest I should be a fat-head 
too. 

Everything on the Blake farm is a pet, from 
the handsome young Jersey bull, to the tiniest 
chick, hatched untimely from a nest-egg. 
They all run toward Mary as soon as she steps 
from the kitchen door, and as she hurries from 
house to barn there is always a rabble of small 
ducks, chickens, calves, and kittens hurrying 
after her. The other day, when she, Henry, 
and Jimmy Dodd, their adopted boy, set off 
for a tour of the lake, a calf swam after them, 
and tried so earnestly to climb aboard that, 
perforce, they turned back to shore and tied 
the foolish creature, lest he should drown 
himself and them. 

Like almost every family in the country- 



24 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

side, the Blakes have adopted a small boy, 
giving him a home and training and enough 
to eat, which he never had before in all his 
forlorn life. They are kindness itself to Jim- 
mie, but Henry regards him with the same 
foreboding he feels for all other native-born 
Canadians. He trains him, but in the spirit 
of ''What's the use?" 

"Jimmie here," he philosophizes, "he can't 
seem to learn the first thing; and if he learns 
it, he can't retain it. I have taught him to 
read, but he can't remember a word; and to 
write, but he forgets it the next day. Mary 
even put him through the catechism, and a 
week later he didn't know one thing about it. 
So what are you going to do? I figure out," 
he goes on meditatively, "that the people who 
learn easy are the ones who have been here be- 
fore. They knew it all in another life, maybe 
in another language, and all they have to do 
is just to recall it. But Jimmie here — well, I 
guess this is his first trip." 

All the while Jimmie of the towhead and 
the thin, wiry legs and arms is grinning at 
his critic with a wide, snaggle-toothed smile 
of great affection. 

The Blakes' house stands on the site of an 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 25 

old log hut, of two rooms and a lean-to shed. 
In digging the cellar they came upon a 
walled-in grave — the boards almost rotted 
away — and in it lay a skeleton. Whose? No 
one knows, for that grave was dug before the 
time of anyone now living at Many Islands. 
Was it some Indian warrior laid there to 
sleep? Was it a settler of the old pioneer 
days? No one can tell and no one cares. The 
Blakes built their comfortable eight-room 
house over his bones and thought no more 
about them. 

Yesterday Mary and I drove to Queens- 
port, the county seat, fifteen miles away, that 
I might show myself at the bank and the 
stores where I am to trade this winter. The 
start was to be early, and I rose at dawn to 
have breakfast over, the cabin cleaned, and I 
myself rowed over to the farm. The woods 
lay wrapped in a heavy mist. Not a wet leaf 
stirred. The water looked like mouse-colored 
crepe, and the sun hung like a big, pink bal- 
loon in a sky of gray velvet. But before our 
start the mists had burned away and the day 
was glorious. 

The road lies through a rolling country, all 
hills, woods, lakes, and glades. Queensport 



26 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

stands at the head of a chain of lakes. It 
boasts two banks, a high school, churches of 
all denominations, and a dozen or so shops 
and houses set in gardens. We dined at the 
hotel, the Wardrobe House ; we transacted our 
business at the bank, and turned then to our 
shopping. We went to the harness shop for 
bread, to the grocer's for a spool of thread, 
to the tailor's to enquire the cost of a tele- 
phone. Then I bethought me of my need for 
some rag carpet. I did not really want that 
carpet that day, indeed, I had not the money 
to pay for it. I only thought of inquiring 
for it while I was in the town. 

We were directed to the hardware shop as 
the most likely place for carpets, and I had 
no sooner mentioned my errand when a voice 
came out from behind a stove saying eagerly: 

"I know where you can find just what 
you're looking for. My old mother has forty 
yards of as fine a rag carpet as you could wish 
to see. Say the word and I'll drive you right 
out to the farm and show it to you." 

Whereupon a tall, wiry, keen-faced man 
rose up and dashed out of the shop, returning 
in an instant with a buggy and a wild-looking 
black horse. Despite my protests we were 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 27 

bundled into the vehicle and driven at a gal- 
lop, through the main street of Queensport, 
and the driving was as the driving of Jehu the 
son of Nimshi. Past farms and fields we flew, 
stopping with a mighty jerk at the door of the 
mother's house. There the carpet was rolled 
forth before me, and there Mary Blake and 
our energetic friend measured me off twenty 
yards of it, by a nick in the edge of the kitchen 
table. 

In vain I pleaded and explained my pov- 
erty. Our abductor waved me a careless 
hand. 

"Money," he assured us, "is the last thing 
that ever worried me. You may pay for the 
carpet when and where you choose." 

On the way back to town my new friend 
was properly presented. His name was Wil- 
liam Whitfield. Later I heard varied tales 
of his peculiarities. There was talk of a 
horse trade, to which Bill Whitfield was a 
party. The other man came out of the trans- 
action the richer by one more experience, but 
the poorer as regarded property. It was told 
me that men said freely that Bill Whitfield 
drunk could get the better of any two sober 
men in the Dominion when it came to a bar- 



28 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

gain, and, as I contemplated my roll of car- 
pet, leaning against the dashboard, I under- 
stood why I had been as wax in his hands, 
and I could only be thankful that it had not 
occurred to Mr. Whitfield to sell me the whole 
forty yards. 

Back we jogged, Mary and I, along the 
quiet roads, discussing our bargains and the 
news of the town. We passed the schoolhouse 
just as "Teacher" was locking the door for the 
night. The dusty road was printed all over 
with the marks of little bare feet, all turn- 
ing away from the school gate and pointing 
toward home. The sun was sinking in a flam- 
ing sky as we came to the shore of our own 
lake, where the rowboat lay on the sand await- 
ing us, a pair of tired travelers, glad to be 
nearing home. 

I would not be a bigot. To each man should 
belong the right to vaunt the glories of his 
own beloved camping ground. There may 
be other places as beautiful as this Lake of the 
Many Islands, although I cannot believe it. 
But Many Islands at sunset, its quiet waters 
all rose and saffron and lavender, under a 
crescent moon; when the swallows skim the 
surface and dip their breasts in the ripple, 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 29 

and the blue heron flaps away to his nest in 
the reeds — Well! I shall see no other spot 
that so moves my heart with its beauty, until 
my eyes look out beyond the sunset and be- 
hold the land that is very far off. 

I drift on past the islands, where the cedars 
troop down to the water's edge, and the white 
birches lean far out over the rocks. The 
colors fade, the far line of the forests be- 
comes a purple blur, and stars come out and 
hang in a dove-gray sky. I land at the little 
dock, safe hidden in the cove; I scramble 
along the dark trail to the house, while the 
loons are laughing and calling as they rock 
on the waves. 



CHAPTER III 

The days are still warm, but autumn is 
surely here. The wasps are dying everywhere 
and lie in heaps on all the window-sills; the 
great water spiders have disappeared, and all 
day long the yellow leaves drift down silently, 
steadily, in the forests. Wreaths of vapor 
hang over the trees, and every wind brings 
the pungent fall odor of distant forest fires. 
The hillsides are a blaze of color, with bass- 
woods a beautiful butter-yellow, oaks, russet 
and maroon and sugar maples, a flame of scar- 
let against the dark-green velvet of the cedars 
and hemlocks. Each birch stands forth, a 
slender Danas, white feet in a drift of gold. 
The woods here on the island are thinning 
rapidly. All sorts of hidden dells and boul- 
ders are coming to light. Soon the whole 
island will lie open to the sight, and then 
there will no longer be anything mysterious 
about it. 

Dried heads of goldenrod, life everlasting, 
and a few closed gentians are all that are left 
of the flowers; but the red and orange gar- 

30 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 31 

lands of the bittersweet wave from every bush, 
the juniper berries are purple, and the sumacs 
are a wonder of great garnet velvet cones. 

From a walk round the trails I bring in an 
assortment of seeds: beggar's ticks, stick- 
seeds, Spanish needles, pitchforks — "the 
tramps of the vegetable world," Burroughs 
calls them. They cover my skirt, they cling 
to my woolen leggings, they perch on the brim 
of my hat. Little pocket-shaped cases, pods 
with hooks, seeds shaped like tiny twin tur- 
tles, and furry balls like miniature chestnut 
burrs. As I pick and brush and tear them 
off I wish I knew what plants had fathered 
every one of them. 

At the approach of cold weather the small 
animals and the few birds that are left draw 
nearer to the house. Grouse are in all the 
paths, flying up everywhere. They rise with 
a thrashing, pounding noise and soar away 
over the bushes, to settle again only a little 
further on. Last evening, at twilight, two 
of them came on the porch, the little cock 
ruffling it bravely, wings dragging, fantail 
spread, ruff standing valiantly erect. A hen 
followed sedately at his heels. They are very 
pretty, about the size of bantam chickens. 



32 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

How I hope that I shall be here to see their 
young in the spring! 

This afternoon a red squirrel came round 
the corner of the house and sat down, absent- 
mindedly, beside me on a bench. When he 
looked up and saw what he had done he gave 
a shriek and a bound and fled chattering ofif 
toward the sundial. But he will come back 
and will probably be darting into the house 
when he thinks my back is turned, for there 
is nothing half so impudent or so mischievous 
as the red squirrel. I am told that they do 
not "den in" as the chipmunks do. 

The rabbits do their best to help me get rid 
of my stores. There are hundreds of them 
about. They sit under the bushes, peering 
out; they appear and disappear between the 
dry stalks of the brakes. At evening they 
come close to the house, and catch bits of 
bread and potatoes thrown to them, then sit 
in the paths munching contentedly. They are 
not rabbits, correctly speaking, but Canadian 
hares, with long brown fur, bulging black 
eyes, furry ears, fringed with black, and very 
long hind legs. One of them comes so close 
and seems so fearless that it should not be 
difficult to tame him. I have named him 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 33 

Peter. These hares turn snow-white in win- 
ter, I am told. Even now their coats are 
showing white where the winter coat is grow- 
ing. 

In the dusk the porcupines come pushing 
through the fallen leaves, snuffling and grunt- 
ing. Away in the woods the bobcats scream 
and snarl. The natives accuse the bobcat 
of a pretty trick of lying flattened out on a 
limb, waiting for his prey to pass underneath, 
then he drops on its back to tear with tooth 
and talon. They warn me not to walk in the 
woods after dark, for fear of this Canada 
lynx. 

But my natural histories say that, while the 
lynx sometimes follows the hunter for long 
distances, he does it only because he is curi- 
ous, and that there is no authentic record of 
the bobcat's ever having attacked a man. So 
I shall continue to take my walks abroad, 
without fear that a fierce tree cat will drop 
on me. But late in the night, when I am 
waked by that eerie sound, that begins with 
a low meow, like the cry of the house cat, and 
goes on louder and louder, to end in a horrid 
screech, full of a malevolent violence, I cover 
my head and am glad that I am safe indoors. 



34 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

I know that the lynx has come forth from 
his lair in a hollow tree and is hunting my 
poor rabbits. 

There is no telephone line to the island; 
sometimes I am stormbound for a week, but in 
some underground way, the news of the neigh- 
borhood reaches me sooner or later. There- 
fore, when I came out of doors the other 
morning, I was instantly aware of a sense of 
impending disaster, that hung over all the 
landscape. There was no cheerful popping 
of guns in the fields, no hoarse voice bawled 
to the cattle. At Blake's the cause of the 
silence was explained. All the men round 
Many Islands had been summoned to the 
County Court at Frontenac, to be tried for 
the illegal netting and export of fish out of 
season. A knot of angry men had gathered on 
the shore, discussing the summons; anxious 
women hovered in the background; specula- 
tion was rife as to the identity of the informer. 

It could have been none of our men, for the 
obvious reason that all were in the same boat. 
Black Jack Beaulac, Yankee Jim, Little Jack, 
Long Joe, William Foret, all had received the 
same summons. It must have been an inspec- 
tor from Glen Avon. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 35 

"Did we not all remember a strange, white 
boat in the lake? That was, without doubt, 
the fish warden come to spy out for nets." 

I know very little about the legality of nets 
versus hooks, or the open and closed seasons 
for fishing, but even to my ignorance there 
seemed grave doubts about the line of defense 
to be offered, and I was conscious that, being 
an alien and a ''sport" (vernacular for sports- 
man, that is, summer visitor), the matter was 
not being freely discussed in my presence. 

Next morning, while it was yet dark, 
Foret's motor boat was heard, chugging sol- 
emnly round the shore, gathering up the vic- 
tims to take them to court. All day the women 
went softly, each wondering what was hap- 
pening to her man, and devising means for 
scraping up the money for fines, if fines it had 
to be. Henry Blake went off to town to the 
trial, and the day passed gray and lowering. 

At red sunset the boat turned in at the nar- 
rows, but before she hove in sight the very 
beat of her engine signaled victory. She came 
swinging down the lake, her crew upright, 
alert, the flag of Canada flew in the wind, 
her propeller kicked the water joyously. As 
she made the round of the lake, to Blake's, to 



36 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

Beaulac's to Drapeau's, to the Mines, it 
needed none to tell us that all was well. 

Foret touched at the island last to give 
news of the fight. The case had been dis- 
missed for lack of evidence. There had been 
no conviction, no fines. 

"How did it happen that there were no 
witnesses?" I asked. 

Foret took out his pouch and stuffed his 
pipe carefully before he answered. 

"There was eight or nine fellers there from 
Blue Bay," he said. "They looked like they'd 
come to testify, but, after we had talked to 
them a bit, it seemed like they hadn't nothing 
at all to say." 

"What had you told them?" I persisted. 

"Well, we told them that if any man felt 
like he'd any information to give, concern- 
ing netting fer fish, he'd best make his plans 
to leave the lake afore twelve o'clock to-night. 
We meant it too; they knowed that. Black 
Jack give them some very plain talk. Black 
Jack did. I guess," with a grin, "I guess that 
I was about the politest man there." 

"I was fined once," William went on, rem- 
iniscently, "twenty-five dollars it was too, 
an' it just about cleaned me out. They put 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 37 

me on oath, you see, an' of course, when a 
man's on his oath he can't lie. But the next 
time I went to town I seen a lawyer, an' he 
told me they hadn't no right to ask me that 
question. A man ain't called on to testify 
against himself. So now, when the judge asks 
me: 'Did you, or did you not, net fer fish?' 
I says, 'That's fer you to prove. Bring on 
your witnesses.' Howsoever," he went on, 
''as long as all this has come up, I guess we'd 
as well eat mudcats fer a spell." 

So mudcats it was, until the herring began 
to run. 

Foret has kept me supplied with fish this 
fall, explaining carefully that he will sell me 
pickerel, herring, and catfish but not bass. 
Bass, being a game fish, may not be caught for 
the market. I have paid for the pickerel by 
the pound and the bass have been gifts, for, 
as William justly remarks : "What are a few 
bass, now and then, in a friendly way?" 

Foret is long, lean, powerful, with thin, 
keen face, steady, dark eyes, and the long, si- 
lent tread of the woodsman. Sometimes he 
works in the Mica Mines; sometimes he 
farms a bit, or fells trees. More often he 
hunts and fishes, but always he is a delightful 



38 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

companion, because of his unconquerable op- 
timism and fervent interest in all that concerns 
a matter in hand. He never admits a diffi- 
culty, no obstacle ever daunts him, and no one 
has ever heard him say an unkind thing about 
any living creature. 

When William goes off to a dance, Jean 
Foret is wild with anxiety. When he drinks 
a bit too much and the other men throw him 
into a hayfield or a barn, to sleep it ofif, she 
ranges the county in a despairing search. 
When he sobers and comes home, subdued 
and bearing gifts, who is so contrite as he? 

"Never again will I go to a dance. There's 
nothing to it at all," he assures you. "A man's 
better ofif to home." 

But once in so often William takes his fling 
— only he is never ugly or quarrelsome when 
he drinks. Even when his mind has lost con- 
trol, he is quiet and peaceable, they say. 

The Forets live on the mainland, three 
miles ofif, along the shore. William is build- 
ing their house by degrees. This season he 
went as far as the inner wall, frame, studding, 
windows, chimney, and floor. There is also 
an outer casing of builder's paper tacked on 
with small disks of tin. The whole edifice 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 39 

stands on stilts, about five feet off the ground, 
giving fine harbor for the hounds, and a pig 
or two beneath. The first time I called to see 
them William made a great show of driving 
these animals forth. 

"The boards is so thin," he apologized, 
"that it seems like I can smell them dogs up 
through the floor." 

When I remember that one thickness of 
board and a few sheets of paper are all that 
stand between the Forets and the winter 
blasts, I shudder. Not so the Forets. They are 
apparently quite undismayed and look for- 
ward to the approach of winter without mis- 
giving. 

The house is divided into two rooms, each 
about ten feet square. There are lace curtains 
at the tiny windows, bright pictures, mostly 
colored calendars, a gay rag carpet, and over 
all the comfort of an exquisite neatness, for 
Mrs. Foret is the cleanest housekeeper im- 
aginable — Jennie Foret, with her snapping, 
black eyes, her dark hair upreared in a mil- 
itant pompadour, her trim, alert figure, and 
quick, light movements. Where did she ac- 
quire her love of order and her dainty, cleanly 
ways, I wonder? 



40 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

It is a friendly place. Chickens, ducks, 
geese, cats, dogs, horses and cows roll, run, 
squawk, and squeal all over the hillside. In 
the cove before the house live-boxes are 
moored, motor boat and skiffs lie at anchor. 
There are nets and skins drying on the fences. 
Two bunches of ribbon-grass do duty for a 
formal garden, standing sentinel on either side 
of the path that winds to the door. The house 
looks away across the 'Mrowned lands" where 
the wicked roots and snags of the submerged 
forest stand in the water, threatening naviga- 
tion. The channel to the landing is winding 
and treacherous. But, once at the door, no 
guest is ever turned away. Wandering miner, 
tramp, bewildered emigrant, each is sure of a 
meal, a bed, and something to set him on his 
way. 



CHAPTER IV 

Wild geese flying over, cold mornings, 
colder nights, warn me that it is time to lay in 
supplies of firewood, oil and food against the 
coming of winter. Last evening a laden row- 
boat passed the island, going eastward under 
the Moon of Travelers. In the stern were a 
stove, a chair, a coffeepot, a frying pan, a great 
pile of bedding, and, surmounting all, a fid- 
dle. The man at the oars threw me a surly 
"Good night," and turning, looked back at 
me with a scowl. It was Old Bill Shelly, the 
hermit of the countryside — trapper, frogger, 
netter of fish, and general ne'er-do-well. He 
has built log shacks all round the shores — lit- 
tle, one-room affairs, filled with a miscellane- 
ous assortment of nets, guns, dogs, all forlorn 
and filthy past description. When one be- 
comes uninhabitable, he leaves it and moves 
on to the next, but at the approach of cold 
weather he always goes into winter quarters 
at Blue Bay, and his flitting, like the flitting 
of the other wild things, means that all nature 
is getting ready for ''le grand frete." 

41 



42 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

Poor Shelly! his is the only hostile glance 
that I have encountered in my wander- 
ings. Even Old Kate, the witch at Les Ra- 
pides, has smiled at me. 

"Mind Old Kate," the neighbors caution 
me. *'If she ever crosses her fingers at you, 
it's all day with you then." 

But when I met her in the road she spoke 
in quite a friendly way. 

''Cold weather coming," she said. "Get in 
your wood." 

Doubtless she thinks me another as crazy 
as herself. 

So I must set about getting enough wood 
to last until the January sawing, and must 
pack eggs and butter against the time when 
hens stop laying and cows go dry, for there is 
no shop nearer than Sark, six miles away, and 
even if one could reach it, through the winds 
on the lake, or the drifts in the roads, there 
would be no butter or eggs to buy. 

Tom Jackson, at the far end of the lake, has 
consented to sell me eight cords of hard 
wood; but to bring it to the island we must 
hire the big scow that ferries mica from the 
mines, and must have Foret's motor boat to 
tug it. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 43 

This life is a great education as regards the 
relative values of things. Wood and water, 
oil and food, are seen here in their true per- 
spective. Already I have learned to rate the 
wealth of a family by the size of the woodpile, 
that stands, like a rampart in the dooryard, 
for I know what a big stock of logs means in 
thrift, foresight, and hard labor. I know what 
it cost to get my own wood to my hand. 

City folk can pass a loaded woodcart with- 
out special emotion, indeed, half the time they 
do not see it, so concerned are they with the 
price of theater tickets, or the cut of the sea- 
son's gowns. But I shall never look at one 
without seeing again a great scow moving 
slowly on the blue bosom of a lake, and I shall 
smell the delicious odor of fresh-cut maple, 
beech, and cedar, far sweeter than the breath 
of any summer garden. 

Ah me! How prosaic will seem the city's 
conveniences of pipes and furnaces as com- 
pared with the daily adventure of carrying 
in the logs, and battling down a windswept 
trail to dip the pails into a pit of crystal ice 
water! Never again shall I turn on the 
spigot in a bathroom without a swift vision of 
that drift-filled path through the woods that 



44 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

leads out on the lake, to where the upright 
stake marks the water hole, hidden under last 
night's fall of snow. 

To one who has only to push a button or 
strike a match to have a room flooded with 
light, the problem of illumination is not per- 
plexing. Here, the five-gallon oil tank must 
be ferried across the lake to Blake's farm; 
whence it must be again sent by boat to Jack- 
son's shore, and there loaded on a wagon for 
Sark. Back it must come to the shore, to 
Blake's, and to the island storehouse — all this 
taking from ten days to two weeks, according 
to when Henry Blake is sending in to the 
store. 

The city postman is no very heroic figure, 
but little Jimmie Dodd is, as he beats his way 
across the lake, and through the high drifts on 
the island, his slender body bowed under a 
great bag of mail, his small face blue with 
the cold. Letters mean something to us here. 
They leave the train at Glen Avon, they come 
by stage to Sark, then they follow the oil tank 
route over water and wood trails to me, and 
it takes as long to get a letter from "The 
States" as to hear from England, "The Old 
Country." 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 45 

To-day a shrill, childish yell sounded from 
the water. There was Jimmie, in a boat, with 
a great basket of eggs. He was fending care- 
fully off from shore, as the high wind threat- 
ened to dash his fragile cargo against the 
rocks. Before those eggs were loaded into the 
skiff a woman had walked five miles with 
them on her back. I spent a long, happy af- 
ternoon, standing them upright on their small 
ends in boxes of salt. When they were all 
packed, twenty-four dozens of eggs seemed a 
great number for one woman to eat, even if 
she expected to have a long winter in which to 
eat them. 

The wood is all stacked on the porch, but it 
was hard work to get it there. The scow 
docked on a beach at the far side of the island, 
there the logs were gayly thrown ashore, and 
there Tom Jackson washed his hands of all 
further responsibility concerning them. The 
duck-shooting had commenced ; no man could 
be found to draw that wood through the island 
to the house, so there it stayed. 

At length William Foret came to my aid 
and promised to haul it, and I was jubilant. 
I did not then know that Foret will promise 
any one anything. No man can promise more 



46 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

delightfully than he. He is always perfectly 
willing, apparently, to help anyone out of 
any dilemma, he recognizes no difficulty in 
the way, and to hear him make light of one's 
most pressing problem is to come to the con- 
clusion that there is no problem there. So 
when William promised to get the wood to 
the house I believed him and was content. 

Meanwhile the days went on, each colder 
than the last. Each morning I toiled to and 
fro from the beach, carrying enough wood, 
two sticks at a time, to last the day. Each 
evening I made a pilgrimage along the shore 
to Foret's to ask why tarried the wheels of 
his chariot. Sometimes he was at home and 
greeted me with a charming cordiality, more 
often he was away, fishing or hunting or cut- 
ting down a bee-tree. Always he was coming 
to the island the very next day. The Forets 
were cut to the heart to learn that I was carry- 
ing my own wood. But for this reason or 
that, William would have been there long 
ago. I was not to worry at all. That fuel 
would be stacked before the snow fell. 

I always started to Foret's with wrath in 
my heart, I always left there soothed and com- 
forted, and by the time I had eaten supper in 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 47 

the boat, had watched the sunset over the 
islands, and had listened to the bell on Blake's 
old red cow, I would go to bed really believ- 
ing that William was coming the next day. 

Sure enough, he did appear one afternoon 
and attacked the woodpile with a very 
fury of energy, trundling load after load up 
the trail for perhaps an hour. Suddenly he 
sat down his barrow and gazed fixedly out 
across the lake. 

"There, I heard my gun," he observed. 
"It's two fellers from Glen Avon, come to 
have me cut them down a bee-tree. I told 
the woman" — meaning Mrs. Foret — "to take 
the little rifle and shoot three times if they 
come, an' that's her. I got to go." 

"Oh, Mr. Foret!" I expostulated, almost 
with tears, "have you the heart to leave this 
wood? Here, you take my pistol and shoot 
for them to come over and lend a hand with 
this work." 

But William was already climbing into his 
boat. 

"It's the little rifle," he said, sentimentally, 
"I've got to go," and away he chugged, leav- 
ing me raging on the shore. 

After all he did come back, and the very 



48 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

next day, Mrs. Foret and little Emmie, their 
adopted child, with him. We all carried 
wood, Jean and I in baskets, little Emmie, one 
stick at a time in her small arms. By evening 
it was all stacked and we were exhausted. 
There it stands, eight feet high, all round the 
house and the place looks like a stockade. 

After supper William cleaned and oiled 
the famous pistol; we women washed the 
dishes and little Emmie skirmished about, 
getting in every one's way, while Jean Foret 
shrieked dire threats of the laying on of a 
"gad" that one knew would never be applied. 
The crows flew home across the sky. The 
child crept close to William's side and fell 
asleep. He moved the heavy little head very 
gently, until it rested more comfortably 
against his great shoulder. 

"Our little girl would have been just the 
age of this one, if she had lived," he said. 

There was a sudden hush, while I remem- 
bered the Foret baby that had died at birth, 
when Jennie had almost died too, and when 
Dr. Le Baron had said that she could never 
have another. 

Presently we gathered barrow, baskets and 
sleeping child, and I watched their boat go 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 49 

ofif, threading its way between the islands and 
points, a little moving speck on the amber 
water. 

Across, on the shore, Joey Drapeau was 
plowing for the fall rye. His voice, bawling 
threatening and slaughter to the steaming 
horses, came across to me, softened by the dis- 
tance. It was Saturday night. Soon the work 
would be done for another week. Then the 
men would go out on the lake, jerking along 
in their cranky little flat-bottomed punts. 
They would sing under the stars, girls' voices 
mingling with their harsher tones. 

Little fiery clouds broke off from the sides 
of the crater, into which the sun had dropped, 
and were drifting across the quiet sky. A 
long finger of light crossed over the island 
and ran like a torch along the eastern hori- 
zon, turning the treetops to flame color and 
burnished copper, and the upland meadows to 
gold. 

On the island the woods were dark, and 
somewhere in their depths a screech owl's cry 
shuddered away into silence. 



CHAPTER V 

November is the month of mosses. Every 
fallen tree, every rotting stump, every rock, 
the trodden paths, and even the hard face of 
the cliff, are padded deep with velvet. The 
color ranges from clear emerald, out through 
the tints to silvery, sage green, and back 
through the shades to an olive brown, almost 
as dark as the earth itself. Round the shores 
the driftwood is piled high on the beach. It 
looks like bleached bones of monsters long 
dead, huge vertebrae, leg bones, skulls and 
branching antlers. The trees are bare, the 
brakes dry and crumbling, but the north point 
of the island, its one naked ugly spot of the 
summer, is now covered with a blood-red car- 
pet. A close-growing, grassy weed has turned 
brilliant crimson and clothed it with beauty. 
Far away on the lake I am guided home by 
that flare of color on the point. 

The birds are gone, all but the crows, that 
perch on the tallest trees and lift their hoarse 
voices in a mournful chorus. But now is the 
time to go bird's-nesting, to find the homes of 

50 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 51 

all the vireos, warblers, creepers, and spar- 
rows that made the island their breeding 
ground. The nests of the vireos, woven of 
birch bark, bits of hornet's nests, grass and 
scraps of paper, are easy to find, for the pretty, 
hanging baskets are fastened in the crotches 
of the bushes and low saplings. The others 
are not so readily discovered, and it was by 
merest accident that I came across the home 
of the brown thrasher, who made the summer 
vocal with his beautiful song. It was on the 
ground and so near the house that I wonder 
that we did not walk into it. It is a mere 
bunch of twigs, so loosely twisted together 
that it fell apart when it was moved. 

Every afternoon I go faggotting, bringing 
in armloads of dry sumac and fallen branches. 
They are not especially good for kindling, but 
now that the deer season is on, no man will 
work; so until after November fifteenth, the 
reign of the Hunter's Moon, the brush pile 
must serve. It takes constant gathering to 
collect enough to start the hardwood fires, and 
a wet day sets me back sadly. I pile up as 
much as I can in the empty sleeping shacks, 
to keep it dry, and I can only hope that the 
snow will not come before someone has been 



52 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

induced to lay aside his gun and cut a cord or 
two of driftwood kindling. 

Butterflies are always coming in on the 
twigs. With their wings folded flat together, 
showing only their dry undersides, they look 
so like old withered leaves that it is only when 
the warmth of the room wakes them, and they 
flutter off to the windows, that they can be 
recognized as butterflies at all. One flew to 
the south window yesterday and crawled 
there, beating his delicate wings against the 
glass all morning. He was brown, tan and 
yellow on the upper side but underneath so 
like a dry, woolly old leaf as to be an amaz- 
ing bit of nature's mimicry. As I looked at 
his poor, torn wings and feebly waving anten- 
nae he seemed suddenly the very oldest thing, 
the lone survivor of a forgotten summer, a 
piteous little Tithonus, to whom had been 
granted the terrible gift of immortality, with- 
out the boon of an immortal youth. 

At first I thought that he was being given 
a respite from the common fate of butterflies, 
for I did not then know that the angle wings 
can last over the winter, lying dormant in pro- 
tected places, and that the last brood of a 
summer can live until another spring. I even 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 53 



planned to outwit nature by feeding this one 
and keeping him alive in the artificial sum- 
mer of the warm house. I made a sirup of 
sugar and water and offered it but the butter- 
tiy would none of it, only crawling and beat- 
ing his wings in a vain effort to escape through 
the glass into the bleak November sunshine. 
At length I carried him to the door, and he 
fluttered off to a bush and clung there. After 
turning away 
for a moment I 
w e n t back to 
find him; he 
w a s gone ; he 
had become a 
dead leaf again. 
Peter, the 
rabbit, spends 
most of his time 
at the door, 
waiting f o r a 
chance crust. 
He sits on his 
haunches, rock- 
ing gently back 
and forth, mak- 
ing a soft, little 




"PETER, THE RABBIT, IS TURN- 
ING WHITE VERY RAPIDLY'' 



54 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

knocking noise on the porch floor. If I am 
late in coming out at mealtimes, he looks at me 
with so dignified an air of patient reproof that 
I feel quite apologetic for having kept him 
waiting. His meal finished, he washes his face 
and paws carefully, like a cat, then sits in the 
sun, eyes closed, forepaws tucked away under 
his breast and ears laid back along his shoul- 
ders. He is turning w^hite very rapidly. At 
first, only his tail, feet, breast and the ends of 
his ears were lightly powdered, but now he 
looks as if he had hopped into a pan of flour by 
mistake. 

Other hares, now lean and wild, come out 
of the woods at dusk and try to share Peter's 
bread. But he turns on them fiercely, driving 
them back over the hill, with an angry noise, 
something between a squeal and a grunt. If 
anyone thinks a rabbit a meek, poor-spirited 
creature, he should see Peter, when threatened 
with the loss of his dinner. Evidently, he be- 
lieves that he has pre-empted this territory 
and all that goes here in the way of food, and 
he means to defend his claim. 

Rufus, the red squirrel, torments Peter un- 
mercifully, dashing across the ground under 
his nose and snatching the bread from be- 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 55 

tween the rabbit's very teeth. He is there and 
away before the rabbit knows what has hap- 
pened. Poor, slow little Peter stood these at- 
tacks in bewildered patience for a time, but 
now he has worked out a plan for getting 
even with the squirrel that serves him fairly 
well. He sits on his crust, drawing it out 
inch by inch from under him as he nib- 
bles, but even at that Rufus gets about half. 
I am training the rabbit to take his food from 
my hand, for nothing thrown on the ground 
is safe for an instant from the little red-brown 
robber. It took some very patient sitting to 
overcome Peter's timidity, but after the first 
bit was taken the rest was easy. Now he 
comes fearlessly to me as soon as I appear. 

The squirrel is growing very tame too, but 
he will never be as tranquil a companion as 
the rabbit. He lacks Bunny's repose of man- 
ner. He is sitting on the windowsill now, eat- 
ing a bit of cold potato. He turns it round 
and round, nibbling at it daintily. Now 
and again he stops to lay a tiny paw on his 
heart — or is it his stomach? The area of his 
organs is very minute and it may be either. 

There is something very flattering in the 
confidence of these little creatures of the 



56 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

island. How do they know that they may 
safely trust my kindness? How can they be 
sure that I will not betray them suddenly with 
trap or gun? 

The rabbit came into the house yesterday, 
padding about noiselessly on his cushioned 
toes. He stopped at each chair and stood on 
his hind feet, resting his forepaws on the seat. 
He examined everything, ears wriggling, nose 
quivering, tail thumping on the carpet. Sud- 
denly he discovered that the door had blown 
shut and then he went quite wild with fear. 
He was in a trap, he thought, and tore round 
and round the room, jumping against the win- 
dow panes, dashing his head against the walls 
until I feared that he would injure himself 
before I could reach the door to open it. Poor 
little Peter, he is not valiant after all. He 
comes in still, but always keeps close to the 
door, and the way of escape must always be 
open. 

The men on the mainland hunt over the 
islands, putting on the dogs to drive ofif the 
game. When the ice holds, the hounds will 
come over of their own accord to course the 
rabbits. I should like to feel that for the 
term of my stay this one island could be a 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 57 

place of safety for the animals that take refuge 
here, and so I have paid visits of ceremony to 
the neighboring farms to explain that I shall 
spend the winter and to ask that the dogs be 
kept off my preserve, as far as possible for the 
sake of my pets. I may say that my wish has 
been respected in the kindest way, and my 
neighbors have done their best to make the 
island a sanctuary for the birds and beasts. 
The first assurance of each visitor has been, 
"I tied up my dogs afore I started over." It 
was the opening remark of an early caller who 
strode into the room this morning as I was eat- 
ing a late breakfast. A reassuring saluta- 
tion, for without it I might have feared that 
the speaker had dropped in to do me a mis- 
chief, his appearance was so very intimidat- 
ing. He was tall and very lean, a sort of cross 
between an Indian and a crane. His greasy, 
black hair hung in rattails on the turned-up 
collar of a dingy red sweater. He wore a 
ragged squirrel-skin cap, tail hanging down 
behind — which headgear he did not remove, 
and he carried a murderous looking ax. Fol- 
lowing came a boy of about sixteen, whose 
smile was so friendly and ingratiating that I 
felt comforted when I saw it. The two drew 



58 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

up to the stove, lit pipes, conversed, and in the 
round-about course of their remarks I gath- 
ered that they had heard of my need of kin- 
dling wood and had come to cut me a cord. 
Presently they retired to a secluded spot on 
the shore and chopped away, emerging every 
half hour or so to bring a load up to the house. 

In this country men eat where they work, 
so toward noon I bestirred myself to prepare 
what I considered a particularly good dinner 
for my ''hands." I had a theory that my 
chances of getting future kindling cut de- 
pended on the good impression made on these 
first workmen. I had corned beef, potatoes, 
peas, and tinned beans. I made hot biscuit, 
cake, stewed apples, and prepared the inevi- 
table pot of strong tea. The man drew his 
chair to the table with perfect self-possession, 
speared a potato from the pot with his knife 
and remarked: "You ain't much of a cook, 
are you?" — adding, kindly, "I think I'll just 
try yer tea." 

He assured me subsequently that he had no 
particular fault to find with my dinner. He 
only meant to put me at my ease and to make 
conversation. 

When he departed in the evening, after 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 59 

having cut and stacked an incredible amount 
of wood, he assured me that he would be ready 
to work for me at any time. I had only to 
''holler" and he would drop a day's hunting 
to come to my aid. So the dinner could not 
have been so unsatisfactory after all. 

News of the Great War has come to Many 
Islands. William Foret returned from Glen 
Avon the other day with great tales of armed 
men guarding the railroad bridges against the 
Germans. He also brought the information 
that I am a German spy. He heard that at the 
station. 

"That woman on the island is there for no 
good," the loafers were saying. "She's a spy. 
She's got a writing machine there an' she's 
sending off letters every day." 

One inventive soul was even asserting that 
I am not a woman at all, but a man in woman's 
clothes and that there is a wireless station 
here. 

But William stood up for me bravely. 

"Spy, nawthin," he scoffed. "What could 
she be a spyin' on there on that island? 
There's nawthin' there but rabbits. No, as I 
understand it, she's some sort of a book- 
writer off fer health. She's got no wireless, 



6o A WINTER OF CONTENT 

that I know, fer I've been over the ground 
there time and again." 

But the crowd was not convinced. 

^'She'd ought to be investigated," they de- 
clared. 

Then William rose to the occasion nobly. 
"She's no German spy," he said. *'She's an 
all-right woman, and ef any man feels like 
makin' any trouble fer her, me an' Black Jack 
and Yankee Jim stands ready to make it very 
onhealthy fer him." 

"I told them," added William, with a de- 
lighted grin, "that you'd a little gun here 
an' you'd use it on the first man that come on 
the island without you knowed him fer a 
friend. But I didn't say that you only stood 
five feet five in yer boots and didn't weigh 
over a hundred pounds." 

Under the shield of William's favor and 
the wholly undeserved reputation of being a 
good shot, I continue to sleep o' nights, but I 
have no fancy for being investigated. 

Last night a boat stopped at the shore, long 
after dark, and I was startled for a moment 
until I heard a chant that rose at the dock and 
continued up the trail to the house. Uncle 
Dan Cassidy had brought over the mail and 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 6i 

a Thanksgiving box from home, but he was 
taking no chances. 

"Friends, friends, don't shoot, don't shoot," 
he sang until he stepped on the porch. 

But while war and its rumors excite us, all 
topics pale in interest before the fact that the 
herring have begun to run. Whether battles 
are lost or won we still have to eat, a pig or a 
sheep does not last very long and the fish are 
a great part of the winter food. 

"They save the meat," says Harry Sprig- 
gins. 

So when the first silver herring came up 
in the net there was great rejoicing. Then 
the little skiffs and punts started out, danc- 
ing and curtseying on the waves. The nets 
were stretched across the narrows between the 
islands, and, during the herring run, no other 
work was done. The season is short; there is 
no time to waste. The run began this year 
on the twelfth, the greatest catch was on the 
eighteenth, the fishing was over on the twenty- 
eighth. The fish do not come up except at a 
temperature of about thirty-four. 

These are the bright, frosty days — days 
when the blood runs quick and the air tastes 
like wine; when the water is deep-blue, the 



62 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

waves run high and the whitecaps race in to 
the shores. 

The little boats bob up and down, the long 
nets come up spangled with the gleaming fish, 
and the tubs and boxes are piled high with the 
silver catch. As the fishermen pass they stop 
at the island and throw me off a herring or 
two. Every house on the mainland reeks; 
barrels and kegs stand in every dooryard, and 
everywhere the women and children are busy 
cleaning the fish. 



CHAPTER VI 

The time of great winds has come, the 
heavy November gales that roar down the 
lakes, lashing the water into white-capped 
waves, dashing the driftwood against the 
rocks and decking the beaches with long 
wreaths of yellow foam. The swell is so 
strong and the waves so high that even the 
men do not care to venture out. When I must 
get over to Blake's farm I hug the shore of 
the island to the point, then dash across the 
channel between this land and his, and the 
wind turns my light skiff round and round be- 
fore I can catch the lee again. 

All night the house rocks and shivers and 
the trees creak, groan and crash down in the 
woods. I am afraid to walk the trails because 
of falling branches, for if I were struck down 
I should lie in the path for days and no one 
would know that I had been hurt. 

These winds give the strangest effect of dis- 
tant music. I am always thinking that I can 
almost hear the sound of trumpets, blowing 
far away. 

63 



64 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

Inside the house is warm and comfortable, 
with its creamy yellow walls of unpainted 
wood, its many windows, its pictures, its 
books; but I am lonely; I cannot settle to any 
occupation. The constant roaring of the wind 
unnerves me, the gray, scudding clouds de- 
press me. A hound on the shore bays and 
howls day and night. I have heard no human 
voice for more than a week. 

The storm died away in a smothering fog 
that settled down on the very surface of the 
lake, blotting out everything. I could not 
see one inch beyond the shore. The mainland 
was hidden, the opposite island was invisible 
— everything was gone except the land on 
which I stood. I could hear voices at the 
farms, the sound of oars, and people talking 
in the boats as they passed. Men were hunt- 
ing on the mainland, almost a mile away. I 
could hear their shots and the cries of the 
hounds, but I might as well have been stricken 
blind, for all that I could distinguish. All 
sorts of fears assailed me. Suppose men 
should land on the island in the fog, how 
could I see to escape them? Suppose the fog 
should last and last, how would I dare to go 
out in a boat for any provisions? Suppose I 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 65 

should be ill, or hurt, how could I signal to 
the farm for help? 

By evening the fog had thoroughly fright- 
ened me; it was time to pull myself together. 
So I cooked a particularly good dinner, read 
a new book for awhile, then went to bed 
praying that the sun would be shining in the 
morning. 

After being asleep for what seemed hours, 
I was aware of a loud shouting, followed by 
heavy steps on the porch and a voice calling 
as someone knocked and pounded on the door. 
I stumbled out of bed, half asleep, and groped 
my way to the lamp, fortunately forgetting 
all about the pistol laid by my side for just 
such an emergency. When the door was 
finally opened, the shapeless bulk of a woman 
confronted me — the very largest woman I 
have ever seen. She loomed like a giant 
against a solid bank of fog that rolled in be- 
hind her. 

"I don't know where I am," she announced. 
"I'm all turned round. I've been rowing 
hours and hours in the fog, and I've a boy, a 
pail of eggs, a mess of catfish and a little wee 
baby in the boat." 

"For mercy's sake," I ejaculated, "what are 



66 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

you doing out in a boat with a baby on a night 
like this? Who are you anyway?" 

"I'm from Spriggins' farm," she answered, 
"the place where you gits yer chickens at. 
I've been over at Drapeau's spending the 
evening and I started to row home two hours 
ago. But the fog got me all turned round, 
and when I struck this shore I says: 'This 
must be the island where the woman's at. Ef 
she's to the house I'll wake her and git me a 
light.' " 

I gave her a lantern and she went off to the 
shore, while I threw fresh logs on the smol- 
dering fire and tried to wake myself. 

Presently a dismal procession returned: a 
boy, laden with shawls and wraps, the woman 
carrying a baby. When that infant was un- 
wrapped, it needed not its proud mother's 
introduction to tell me whose child it was. 
Harry Spriggins is a small, wiry man, with 
sharp, black eyes and a face like a weasel. 
The baby was exactly like him. They were 
a forlorn trio, and, oh, so dirty! My heart 
sank as I surveyed them, realizing that they 
were on my hands for the night. Then I felt 
properly ashamed of myself, for if the poor 
soul had not found the island she might have 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 67 

been on the lake in an open boat until day- 
light ; and by this time a rain was falling, quite 
heavily enough to have swamped so unsea- 
worthy a craft as her small, flat-bottomed 
punt. 

For some time we sat gazing at one another, 
while I tried to determine what should be 
done with my guests. Finally I sent the boy 
to the storehouse for extra mattresses, and pre- 
pared them beds on the floor. Clean sheets 
were spread over everything. Probably the 
woman had never slept on clean sheets before, 
but I reasoned that sheets could be washed 
more easily than blankets, and just then wash- 
ing seemed to me very essential. 

About one o'clock we all settled down for 
the night, but not to sleep — oh, no! The 
woman was far too excited for that. Thanks 
to the fire that I had made, in my stupidity, 
and to the air in the cabin, I could not sleep 
either, so I heard a great deal of the inside his- 
tory of the neighborhood, before morning. 

I learned that minks are a menace to the 
poultry industry here about. In Spriggins' 
own barnyard, a flock of thirty-six young 
turkeys were found all lying dead in a row, 
with their necks chewed off — a plain case of 



68 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

mink, and a dire blow to the finances of the 
family. 

At three o'clock I had the life history of a 
Plymouth Rock rooster, of superlative intelli- 
gence, that always crowed at that precise hour. 
At four I was roused from an uneasy doze by 
the query: "Do you know anything about 
Dr. So-and-So's cure for 'obsidy'?" 

After puzzling over the word for some 
minutes I gathered that "obesity" was what 
was meant, for my guest went on, pathetically 
enough, to tell me how hard her work was 
and how she suffered in doing it, burdened 
with that mountain of flesh. 

"There's another cure," she went on. "It's 
Mrs. So-and-So's, but it calls for a Turkish 
bath, and where could I get that? Beside, 
I could never do all that rolling and kick- 
ing." 

Peering through the gloom at what looked 
like the outline of an elephant on the floor, 
I did not see how she could, but I felt that 
if there were any known way of getting that 
woman into a Turkish bath I would cheer- 
fully bear the expense. 

At six I gave up the struggle and rose for the 
day, stumbling about from cabin to kitchen 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 69 

to cook breakfast in the semi-darkness, for 
the fog was still thick. At nine, the day 
being a little lighter, I made the mistake of 
suggesting that the boy row over to Blake's 
for some bread and the mail. He departed, 
and stayed for hours. Soon his mother be- 
gan to fidget and finally set off for the shore 
to search for him, leaving that changeling of 
a baby in my care. 

There it lay on my bed, staring at me with 
its black beads of eyes, and looking as old as 
the Pharaoh of the Exodus and as crafty. 
The mother stayed and stayed away. I had 
visions of being left with that child on my 
hands all winter. I saw myself walking it 
up and down the cabin through the long 
nights. I saw myself sharing with it my last 
spoonful of condensed milk, but, as I sur- 
veyed it, I knew what I would do first. I 
would give it the best bath it had ever had in 
its short life and I would burn its filthy little 
clothes. 

But while I was harboring these designs 
against that innocent child its mother came 
back, her hands full of green leaves. She had 
not found the boy, but she had gathered what 
she called "Princess Fern." 



70 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

"This is awful good fer the blood," she 
announced. "Ef yer blood is bad, this will 
make it as pure as spring water; if it's pure, 
this will keep it so. It's good fer you either 
way." 

The mention of blood led naturally to the 
recital of the various accidents she had seen, 
and I learned that there are several blood 
healers in the neighborhood — persons who 
can stop the flow by the recitation of a cer- 
tain verse of Scripture. A man can perform 
this miracle for a woman and a woman for a 
man, but a man cannot cure another man, nor 
a woman another woman. This charm must 
never be revealed. It can only be transmitted 
at death. It is a sure cure for blood flow and 
quite authentic, according to Mrs. Spriggins, 
who has seen the blood stopped. 

While we were discussing this mystery the 
boy came back, smilingly, from quite a differ- 
ent direction from the one in which he had 
been sent. He had never found the farm, but 
had been all this time wandering in the fog. 
It was all too like a nightmare. I did not 
tempt fate by offering any more suggestions. 
Instead, I bundled the party into their vari- 
ous wrappings, led them to their boat, and 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 71 

turned their faces firmly in the direction of 
home. Then I sat on the porch, tracing their 
progress down the lake by the wailing of that 
wretched baby. When the sounds had finally 
died away, I went in and scrubbed the cabin 
from end to end with strong, yellow soap. 

And the sequel to all this? She was not 
Spriggins' wife at all, but "Spriggins' 
woman," and she was not lost. 

When I mentioned her visit the neighbors 
shook their heads. 

"You couldn't lose old Jane on Many 
Islands," they scoffed. "She wanted to see 
you, that was all; and she knowed you 
wouldn't let her land if she come by day." 

But two men were lost on the lake that 
night, and I believe that Jane was lost too. 

With the rural love of scandal and the usual 
disregard of all laws of probability, the people 
accuse this woman of all sorts of outrageous 
crimes. It is said that she murdered her 
daughter for the girl's bit of life insurance, 
that she has strangled her own babies, that she 
bound her aged aunt face downward on a 
board, and pushed her out on the lake to 
drown. And here was I, all ignorant of the 
character of my guest, gravely discussing with 



72 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

this alleged criminal the proper feeding of 
infants and the rival merits of toilet soaps. 

I stopped at her house the other day to in- 
quire my way. She greeted me with much 
cordiality. 

"You was certainly fine to me that night," 
she said. "I donno what we would a-done, 
ef you hadn't took us in. The baby would 
a-been drownded, I guess." 

Now I am glad that I was "fine" to her, 
for poor Jane is gone, and she died as she had 
lived — without help and without hope. 

Her children's father was away at a dance 
in Sark when she fell in their desolate house. 
Seeing that she did not rise, one frightened 
child crept out of bed and covered her naked- 
ness with an old quilt. In the morning two 
little boys, crying and shivering, made their 
way along the shore to the place where the 
man was sleeping of¥ his debauch. 

"Come home. Pop," they cried. "Mom's 
dead." 

But he would not heed them. 

"It's only one of them spells she gits," he 
grunted. "She'll be all right." 

"No, it ain't no spell. Pop," they cried. 
"She's dead, I tell you. She's cold." 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 73 

Then the neighbors, who had never gone to 
that house when Jane was alive, went now 
and comforted the children. They followed 
the poor body along the ice to its grave, and 
Mrs. Spellman, who has six little ones of her 
own, went over and took the baby home. 

There are a great many of these irregular 
unions here, for Canada is no land of easy di- 
vorce. If you are a poor man, and have any 
predilection for being legally married, you 
must stay with the wife with whom you 
started. Divorce and remarriage are not for 
you. 

In a little book of instructions for immi- 
grants and settlers, published by one of the 
newspapers, the matter is made very plain: 

"In Manitoba, Ontario, Alberta, and Sas- 
katchewan there is no divorce court. Appli- 
cation must be made to the Dominion Parlia- 
ment, by means of a private bill, praying for 
relief by reason of adultery, or adultery and 
cruelty, if it is the wife who is seeking a di- 
vorce from her husband. The charges made 
are investigated by a special committee of the 
Senate, and, if a favorable report is presented 
to the House, the bill usually passes." But 
the little book goes on to state, very simply, 



74 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

that "The expense of obtaining the bill is very 
great, exceeding in any event five hundred 
dollars." 

So for men like Harry Spriggins, whose 
wife deserted him, or for Black Jack's woman, 
whose husband beat her, there is no way out. 
They simply take another mate, and stand by 
the arrangement as faithfully as may be. 



CHAPTER VII 

Winter has thrown a veil of lace over the 
islands, a wet, clinging snow that covers every 
tree-trunk, rock, and stump, and turns the 
cedars to mounds of flufify whiteness. The 
paths lie under archways of bending, snow- 
laden branches, and all the underbrush is hid- 
den. The island wears many jewels, for every 
ice-incrusted twig flashes a cluster of dia- 
monds, the orange berries of the bittersweet, 
each encased in clear ice, are like topaz, and 
the small frozen pools between the stones re- 
flect the sky and shine like sapphires. 

There have been snows since the first week 
in November, but this is the first that has re- 
mained, and how it shows the midnight activ- 
ities of all the wild folk! The porch floor is a 
white page on which they have left their sig- 
natures. Here, by the storeroom door, are 
innumerable little stitch-like strokes. They 
were made by the deer mouse's wee paws. 
There are the prints of the squirrel's little 
hands and a long swathe, where his brush 
swept the snow. The chickadees and nut- 

71 



76 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

hatches came very early. Their three-fin- 
gered prints are all over the woodpile, and on 
the paths are the blurred, ragged tracks left 
by the grouse's snowshoes. Over the hill runs 
a row of deep, round holes, showing that a 
fox has passed that way, and the rabbit's 
tracks are everywhere. 

Every day the water freezes farther and 
farther out from the shores, and it is increas- 
ingly difficult to force a channel through it 
to the open lake. The bay in front of the 
Blakes' house is frozen straight across, and I 
land far away on the point and scramble 
through the bushes to the house when I must 
go over for the mail. Frozen cascades hang 
down over the rocks, pale-blue, jade and soft- 
est cream color. The rocks themselves are 
capped with frozen spray and the driftwood 
wears long beards of ice. 

Walking along the beach to-day I heard a 
great chirping and twittering, like the sound 
made by innumerable very small birds. Could 
a late flock of migrants be stopping in the 
treetops? I wondered. But when I searched 
for the birds there were none. The chirping 
noises came from the thin shore ice, whose 
crystals, rubbed together by the gently moving 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 77 

water, were making the birdlike sounds. Now 
and then would come a sudden "ping" like 
the stroke on the wire string of a banjo, and 
sometimes a clear, sustained tone, like the 
note of a violin. 

As the ice grew thicker these sounds all 
stopped and over all the land broods a pro- 
found silence. The winds are still, no bird 
voices come out of the woods ; even the waves 
seem hardly to rise and fall against the shores. 
It is as though all nature were holding her 
breath to wait the coming of the ice. 

"When the lake freezes over, when the icb 
holds," we have a habit of saying, and, look- 
ing across the uncertainties of the shut-in 
time, when I shall not be able to use the boat 
and when no one can cross over to me, I too 
am longing for the ice. 

The boat can no longer be left in the water. 
Any cold morning would find it frozen in un- 
til spring. It must also be turned every eve- 
ning, lest it fill with snow in the night, so I 
haul that heavy skiff out on the sand; and, 
sure enough, the accident, so confidently pre- 
dicted by my friends, came to pass, for in the 
turning the boat slipped, and down it came, 
full weight across my foot. 



78 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

I am somewhat a judge of pain. I know 
quite a good deal about suffering of one kind 
and another, but this hurt was something 
special in the way of an agony. It turned me 
sick and dizzy, and for several minutes I 
could only stand and gasp, while the trees 
turned round and round against the sky. 
When their whirling had slowed down a bit, 
and I had caught my breath, I hobbled down 
to the edge of the lake, kicked a hole in the 
thin ice with my good foot, and thrust the 
hurt one into the icy water. Then I spoke 
aloud! I did not in the least mean to say 
the words that came to my lips, no one could 
have been more surprised than I when I heard 
them, but with my horrified face turned up to 
the evening sky, and the consciousness that 
there was no way in the world of getting help 
if I were badly hurt, I said, "Great God Al- 
mighty!" 

Thinking it over, I am inclined to believe 
that the ejaculation was, after all, a prayer. 

Knowing that I should probably not be able 
to walk for days, I then hobbled to and fro 
from the house to the lake, filling every pail 
and tub. Then I carried in as much wood as 
I could, and at last took off my shoe. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 79 

It was a wicked-looking injury, a foot 
swollen, bruised, and crushed. I blessed my 
little medicine chest, with its bichloride and 
morphia tablets, its cotton and gauze, that 
made the long hours of that night endurable. 
For more than a week I did my housework 
with a knee on the seat of a chair that I pushed 
along before me round the cabin and the 
porch. No one came to the island, nor could 
I get far enough from the house to call a 
passing boat. 

One afternoon there was a great sound of 
chopping in the narrows between this island 
and Blake's Point. I called, but no one an- 
swered. Later I learned that Henry Blake 
had left a herring net there and that it had 
frozen in. But at that time I felt only the 
faintest interest in whatever was going for- 
ward. They might have chopped a way 
through to China and I would not have cared. 

The long days dragged on, while my hurt 
foot slowly healed. I may say here that it 
was never fully healed until the following 
spring. I had always to keep it bandaged even 
after it had ceased to pain and it was not until 
May that I could forget that it had been in- 
jured. 



8o A WINTER OF CONTENT 

On the eighth the calm weather broke in a 
day of wild winds and flying clouds, when 
the waves rolled in on the shores, and the 
driftwood pounded on the beaches. At eve- 
ning, when the storm had lulled, the lake 
looked like a wide expanse of crinkled lead 
foil. 

Next morning I waked to a bright blue day 
and dazzling sunshine. At first I feared that 
I had been suddenly deafened, the stillness so 
stopped my ears. Then I realized what had 
happened. There was no sound of the mov- 
ing water. The ice had come! 

The lake was a silver mirror that reflected 
every tree, every bowlder, every floating 
cloud. The islands hung between two skies, 
were lighted by two suns. An eagle, soaring 
over the lake, saw his double far below, even 
to his white back, that flashed in the sunlight 
when he wheeled. 

In the glancing beauty of that morning my 
heart flung open all her doors, my breath 
came quickly, and my spirit sang. For the 
first time in my life I understood how frost 
and cold, how ice and snow, can praise and 
magnify the Lord. 

That evening the snow came, turning the 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 8i 

lake into a vast white plain "white as no 
fuller on earth could white it," that lay with- 
out spot or wrinkle under the Indian's Moon 
of the Snowshoes. 

This was the ninth of the month. Then fol- 
lowed long, silent days, when I read and 
sewed and dreamed, and forgot what day of 
the week it was, or what time of the day, and 
wondered how long it would be before some- 
one could come over from the mainland to 
tell me that the ice was safe to walk on. 

Each afternoon I hobbled to the beach and 
paraded there, according to agreement with 
Mary Blake, to let her see that I was still 
alive. The rabbit came in and sat by the fire 
— a queer, silent little companion. The red 
squirrel scampered all over the outside of the 
house, peeping at me through the windows, 
and whisking in at the open door to steal a 
potato or a nut, when he thought my back 
w^as turned. Funny little Rufus! He spent 
a long, hard-working day, stealing the con- 
tents of a basket of frozen potatoes put out for 
his amusement. For months afterward I 
found those potatoes, hard as bullets, stuck in 
the crotches of the cedars all over the island. 

From the ninth to the nineteenth I saw no 



82 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

one and heard no voice. Then I descried 
two men walking across the lake. They car- 
ried long poles, with which they struck the 
ice ahead to test its thickness. Each stroke 
ran along the ice to the shore, with the sound 




Illllilllill lIlllHHIIIIIiMlllll 

THE HOUSE 



of iron ringing against stone. I saw the stick 
fall some seconds before I heard the noise. 

I had never seen men walking across a lake 
before. I had never realized that this lake 
would become a solid floor on which men 
could walk. I shall never forget the excite- 
ment with which I watched them do it. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 83 

Half an hour later Jimmie Dodd burst in, 
with red cheeks and shining eyes, to tell me 
that the ice would hold. 

The way to the farm being once more open, 
I made my Christmas cake, mixing it here 
in the cabin and carrying it three quarters of 
a mile across to the Blakes' big oven. The 
finished loaf came back over the ice, an excel- 
lent cake, as all my Christmas visitors testi- 
fied. 

For let no one assume that because the in- 
habitants of this island are few there has been 
no Christmas here. On the contrary, the feast 
began on Christmas Eve and lasted for a week. 
The tree, a young white pine, was cut on the 
island, the trimmings came from Toronto, and 
great was the anxiety lest the ice should not be 
strong enough to bear the wagon that brought 
them over from Loon Lake Station. But the 
final freeze came just in time, and we, the 
rabbit and I, spent happy days tying on all 
the glittering trifles that go to the making of 
that prettiest thing in the world — a Christ- 
mas tree. There was a big gold star on the 
topmost twig. There were oranges and boxes 
of candy for all invited and uninvited children 
round the lake, and when all was finished, our 



84 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

first visitor was a storm-driven chickadee, that 
wandered in and stayed with us, perched on 
a glittering branch. 

On Christmas Eve the Blakes came and 
had cake and coffee and viewed the tree. On 
Christmas day, came the little Beaulacs, from 
Loon Bay, some walking, some in arms, some 
dragged in a big wooden box over the ice, and 
were refreshed with tea and bread and butter 
and cake, after which they sat round the tree, 
regarding it with great eyes of wonder. Next 
day the Forets came to help me eat the Christ- 
mas duck and tinned plum pudding, and after 
them the Big John Beaulacs, from far back 
of Sark. 

So it went, with a party every day, while the 
brave little tree stood glowing and twinkling 
at us all. It was interesting to note how many 
errands the men found to bring them to the 
island while the Christmas tree was standing, 
and how their heavy faces lightened at sight 
of it. Surely it fulfilled its purpose, sending 
out messages of good will and friendliness and 
the love of God from the feather tip of each 
tiniest twig. 

At midnight on Christmas Eve I went out 
on the porch and walked to and fro there in 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 85 

the biting cold. The rabbit, that had been 
sleeping, a bunch of snow-white fur, on the 
woodpile, hopped down and followed at my 
heels. The lake was a shield of frosted sil- 
ver. The moon shone bright as day. One 
great star blazed over the shoulder of the op- 
posite island — it might have been the very star 
of Bethlehem. So diamond clear was the air, 
so near leaned the sky, that I might almost 
have reached and touched that star. The 
night was so white, so still that I fancied I 
could almost hear the angels' song, and in the 
rainbow glory of the moonlight could catch 
swift glimpses of the flashing of their wings. 
We walked there, the rabbit and I, until the 
cold drove me in, to sleep beside the tree and 
dream of a procession of little Beaulacs, creep- 
ing over the ice, each one with a star in his 
hand. 



CHAPTER VIII 

The Beaulacs belong to a tribe of French 
Canadians that has peopled half the country- 
side. They have various nicknames — Black 
Jack, Little Joe, Yankee Jim, Big John, Rose 
Marie, Marie John, and so on. The Little 
Jack Beaulacs live at Loon Bay, round the 
point and three miles away. The road to 
Loon Lake Station starts at their landing. 
They live in a barn, a sixteen-by-twenty-foot 
log structure, banked with earth to keep out 
the cold. In its one room, along with a double 
bed, a cooking stove, table, sideboard, sewing 
machine, rocking chair, boxes, pots and pans, 
and a clutter of harness and old junk of all 
kinds, live John and Rose and the six young 
Beaulacs, beginning with sixteen-year-old 
Louis and ending with the baby. There is 
one door and a small window, that, so far as 
I know, has never been opened. In summer, 
when the door is left ajar, the room is apt to 
be further inhabited by hens, ducks, cats, and 
even a lamb or two. 

The house stands in a clearing on a per- 
86 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 87 

fectly bare hill, but in summer, the whole 
slope is golden with sheets of tansy, and the 
small dug-out milk house is shaded by a giant 
lilac bush, sole remnant of some long-forgot- 
ten garden. At the foot of the hill, rotting, 
flat-bottomed boats wallow in the mud, and 
there the little Beaulacs spend happy days 
fishing for mudcats, wading for frogs, scream- 
ing, wrangling, and throwing stones into the 
water. 

They have not always lived in a barn. 
They have had two other houses, each burned 
to the ground, with all the pitiful furnishings 
it contained — crushing blows to people as 
poor as the Beaulacs. After the last fire they 
moved into the barn, the only shelter left 
standing, intending to build again in the 
spring. But log-hauling is work, building 
materials cost money, and time went on. 
Now they have settled down contentedly in 
the barn, and will stay there, I doubt not, until 
this roof falls down about their heads. They 
have no fear of another fire. That would be 
impossible, for, as one of the children tells 
me, the last one happened on the full of the 
moon — sure sign that they can never be burned 
out again. 



88 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

Like other men of the settlement, John 
Beaulac works at the mica mine, hunts, fishes, 
and farms a bit. Rose walks barefoot over 
the fields, after the plow, digs the small gar- 
den, raises chickens, picks wild berries, and 
sells frogs to the summer campers, contriving 
thus to supply the few clothes and groceries 
needed. For the rest, they live a happy, care- 
free life in the open, and the young Beaulacs 
scramble up somehow. 

Rose handles the boxes of supplies that 
come from Toronto for the island, driving 
them in from Loon Lake and bringing them 
across the lake by wagon or boat, as the time 
of the year permits. Last time she refused, 
very firmly, to allow me to pay for that haul- 
ing. 

'We ain't agoin' to tax you nothin','' she 
declared. 

When I expostulated, she only shook her 
frowsy head more violently. 

"No," she said, "we do it fer you fer 
nothin'. It ain't like you had a man here to 
do fer you," she reasoned. 

Then she looked at her own man with pride 
and at me with a vast pity, because I had no 
man to work myself to death for. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 89 

In a pioneer neighborhood, where every 
woman must have some man, however worth- 
less, to hew the wood and care for the stock, 
and where every man must have some woman, 
to cook and to keep the house, however lazy a 
slattern she may be, I, who live alone, pay 
for my wood and draw the water, must be a 
creature not to be understood. 

Yesterday the Beaulacs invited me to go 
with them to the races in Henderson's Bay 
— a trying out of the neighborhood horses be- 
fore the yearly races to be held at Queensport 
next week. Scrambling and falling down the 
slippery trail, in answer to their halloo, I 
found a straw-filled wagon body set on run- 
ners and drawn by Beaulac's old mare. She, 
not having been "sharp shod," slipped and 
slid, threatening to break a leg at every step, 
while the wagon slewed from side to side over 
the ice. It was the first time that I had driven 
over a lake. My heart was in my mouth all 
the way. 

Henderson's Bay, a long arm of Many 
Islands, stretches for a mile into the land. It 
is a beautiful horseshoe, with the farm house 
at the toe. The course was laid out on the dull 
green ice, little cedar bushes set up to mark 



90 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

the quarter miles. An old reaper, frozen in 
near the shore, served as the judges' stand. 

We drew up at the side of the track, in the 
lee of a high rock that somewhat sheltered us 
from the piercing wind. It was a friendly 
scene. The encircling arms of the shore 
stretched round and seemed to gather us close. 
The smoke from the house chimneys curled 
up to the low-leaning gray sky, and Hender- 
son's herd, led by a dignified old bull, strolled 
down over the hill as though to see the race. 
Far away on the ice, black spots appeared, 
later discerned to be fast-moving buggies, 
sleighs, and wagons coming to the meet. 
When they were all assembled there must have 
been as many as seven vehicles. There were 
four horses to be tried. They were harnessed 
in turn to a little two-wheeled affair called a 
bike. There is only one "bike" here, so no 
two horses could run at a time, and there had 
to be a great unhitching and harnessing again 
after every trial of speed. Joe Boggs, the 
neighborhood jockey, drove with arms and 
legs all spraddled out, like a spider, and 
urged on his poor steeds with wild cries of: 
"Hi-hi-hi-hi" — enough to frighten a sensible 
horse to death. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 91 

I have never beheld a more professional 
looking horseman than Mr. Boggs. His dis- 
reputable old squirrel-skin cap, that hung off 
the back of his head, his high boots, the bow 
of his legs, the squint of his eye, even the way 
he chewed a straw between races, bespoke the 
true jockey. One felt that if Joe Boggs could 
not put a horse over the track, no one could. 

Rose Beaulac too was a keen judge of a 
horse. She criticized the entries unsparingly 
— Rose, with her long, dry-looking coon skin 
coat, and her dirty red "tuque" cocked over 
one eye. 

"That old mare," she would say, cuttingly, 
"I knowed her in her best days, and then she 
wasn't much." 

That settled the mare for us. Our money 
was not on her. 

There was, however, one horse that she did 
consider worth praise. She told me with awe 
that his owner had refused four hundred dol- 
lars for him — a staggering sum. So valued 
was this animal that he was not to be allowed 
to run any more until the Queensport races, 
but when it was learned that I wished to ad- 
mire him, his owner consented to put him 
once round the course, for my pleasure. 



92 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

After the contestants had each done his best 
— or worst — the meet broke up, with many 
"Good-days" and "Come-overs," and we drove 
back over the ice, the old mare plunging and 
sliding along seemingly quite accustomed to 
being driven, at a gallop, over a sheet of glass. 

The eye swept the outline of the shore on 
which stand the seven homesteads of this arm 
of the lake. Each roof shelters a family of a 
different race and creed. Many Islands is a 
type of the whole of this strong, young coun- 
try, that takes in men of all lands and minds, 
gives them her fertile prairies almost for the 
asking, and makes them over into good Cana- 
dians. 

There are the Blakes, from ''The States," 
and aggressively American; the Jacksons, 
Canadian born and Methodist; the Hender- 
sons, English and Church of England; the 
McDougals, Scotch and Presbyterian; the 
Cassidys, Irish and Catholic; Harry Sprig- 
gins, a sharp-faced little London cockney; and 
the Beaulacs, true French Canadian. Once 
in a while a Swede wanders in and hires out 
for the wood-cutting, or an Indian comes 
along through the lakes in his canoe, and 
camps for awhile on one of the islands. Amid 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 93 

all the dififerences of belief and the clash of 
temperament, the people manage to be 
friendly and neighborly; the children play to- 
gether; the young folk marry, and the next 
generation is all Canadian. 

They all speak English, but when one stops 
to listen, literal translations of idioms and 
queer turns of phrase stand out. Foret al- 
ways speaks of a "little, small" bird or tree or 
what not, and for him things are always "per- 
fectly all right." 

"Do yer moind thot pig, I sold Black 
Jack?" asks Uncle Dan Cassidy. 

" 'Ow bar you to-d'y?" inquires Harry 
Spriggins. 

"Oh, not too bad," answers John Beaulac. 
"Pas trop mal," he is saying, of course. 

When John has finished a job he stands off, 
hands in pockets, and observes : "That iss now 
ahl bunkum sah." After a moment's ponder- 
ing one knows that "Bon comme qa" is what 
he means. 

They speak of coming home through the 
"Brooly." That is the scrub wood through 
which a forest fire once swept. It is the land 
"brule" — burned over. While they live in 
Canada their talk is of far away lands, and it 



94 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

is to the "Old Country" that they mean to 
return some day. 

And from the house on the island I see the 
life go by — the stern, bare life of the country 
— with its never-ending toil, its uncounted 
sacrifices, its feuds, its ready charities and the 
piteous, unnecessary sufferings of the sick. 
Blessed be the rural telephone, lately come to 
Many Islands, that has made it possible for 
Dr. LeBaron to reach a patient the day he is 
called. Thrice blessed the tinkle of those lit- 
tle bells that bring the voices of the world to 
the farms, shut in behind the snowdrifts. To 
the women, dulled with labor and shaken with 
loneliness, they are the little bells of courage. 

I stopped at a farm the other day — a very 
lonely place. Scarce were the first greetings 
over when the young mistress of the house 
said, proudly: "We have the telephone here. 
Would you care to talk to any of your 
friends?" 

Something in her tone, the eager shining of 
her eyes, brought a rush of tears to my own. 
It was the supreme effort of hospitality. She 
was offering me the thing that had meant life 
itself to her, the dear privilege of speaking 
with a friend. 



CHAPTER IX 

We are at the very heart of winter now. It 
is "le grand frete," that I have been secretly 
dreading, and all my ideas of it are changing 
as the quiet days go on. Winter in the woods 
has always seemed to me the dead time — the 
season of darkness and loneliness and loss. I 
find it only the pause before the birth of a new 
year. If I break off a twig, it is green at the 
heart, when I brush away the snow, the moss 
springs green beneath it. Close against the 
breast of the meadow lie the steadfast, ever- 
green rosettes of the plantain, sorrel, moth 
mullen, and evening primrose, waiting in pa- 
tience for the melting of the snow. I never 
dip a pail into the hole in the ice without 
bringing up a long trailer of green waterweed, 
or a darting, flitting little whirligig beetle — 
the gyrinus — somewhat less lively than in 
summer, to be sure, but still active and alert. 
There is a big, fresh-water clam lying at the 
bottom of the waterhole. He breathes and 
palpitates, lolling out a soft pink body from 
the lips of a half-open shell. 

95 



96 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

Yes, winter here is only a slumber, and 
everything is stirring in its sleep. They all 
proclaim again the old, old covenant, made 
v^^ith the perpetual generations, that promise 
of the sure return of seedtime and harvest, 
cold and heat, summer and winter, and day 
and night, that shall not cease while the earth 
remains. 

The colors of winter are slate-blue and 
gray, laid on a background of black and white. 
The chickadees and nuthatches wear them — 
black velvet caps, gray coats, white waist- 
coats. In the mornings long, slate-blue 
shadows stretch away from the points of all 
the islands, and every smallest standing weed 
casts its tiny blue shadow across the snow. 
The ice is darkly iridescent, like the blue 
pigeon's neck and head. 

The dawns come late, the sunsets early, and 
in the twilight the mice steal out from the 
woods and climb up and down on the win- 
dow screens, little misty, gray blurs moving 
swiftly against the soft, gray dusk. 

Through the long evenings, when supper is 
over, the curtains drawn and the long sides of 
the big box stove glowing red, I read and think 
and dream. All the while the timbers of the 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 97 



house crack and snap with the cold, the trees 
twist and creak in the wind, and the ice groans 
and mutters. Now and again it gives a long 
sigh, as though some heavy animal were im- 
prisoned under 
it and were 
struggling to es- 
cape. I imagine 
him heaving at 
it with a great 
shoulder, grunt- 
ing as he pushes, 
and sinking 
back to rest be- 
f o r e pushing 
again. Late in 
the night comes 
a long roar, as 
though the 
beast had 
broken forth 
and were call- 
ing to his mate. 

Most people undress to go to bed. Here I 
undress and dress again, putting on heaviest 
woolen underwear, long knit stockings, flan- 
nel gown and sweater over all. I creep into 




A POINT OF ONE OF THE 
ISLANDS 



98 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

bed and lie between flannel sheets and under 
piled blankets, and throw a fur coat across 
the foot, in preparation for that first hurried 
dash across the room at dawn. 

There is only one anguished moment in the 
twenty-four hours. It is when the fire has 
burned out, and the cold wakes me. \Iy 
movements then are reduced to the least pos- 
sible number. Almost with one motion I 
spring out of bed, fling the window shut, tear 
back the whole top of the stove, throw in 
fresh logs, put on the coffeepot, then skurry 
back to bed to doze until the cabin is warm. 

There is not the least trouble about keep- 
ing my stores cool. The problem is to pre- 
vent their freezing. The potatoes and eggs 
freeze in the very room with me, a pot of 
soup, set in the outer vestibule, is a hard block 
from which I crack a piece with the ax when 
I wish a hot supper. The condensed milk is 
hard frozen, the canned plum puddings rattle 
about in their tins like so many paving stones, 
and it takes all day to heat them. Early in 
December, I laid a jagged bit of ice on the 
corner of the porch, and there it lies, its shape 
quite unchanged through weeks of bitter 
weather. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 99 

There is an inch or two of ice over the 
waterhole every morning. When I go to fill 
the pails, I take the little ax along to chop my 
cistern open, but gradually the walls of ice 
close in and about once a week someone must 
cut me a fresh waterhole in another spot on 
the lake. 

The drying of the weekly wash is a most 
perplexing thing. Clothes hung outside the 
house freeze immediately of course. If they 
are hung inside, the room is filled with their 
steam. My only plan is to heat the cabin red- 
hot, hang them indoors, bank the fire for 
safety and take to the lake or go a-visiting, for 
a certain number of clean clothes one must 
have, if only to keep up one's self-respect. 

This morning I woke so stiff with cold that 
I was almost afraid to move in bed, lest a 
frozen finger or toe should drop off. There 
was no more sleep, so, cowering over the 
stove, I watched the sunrise, more augustly 
beautiful than I have ever seen it. The bright 
crescent of last month's moon hung, point 
downward, on a sky of mouse-gray velvet. 
Over it stood the morning star. Along the 
eastern horizon lay a line of soft brightness, 
that glowed through a veil of gray gauze. 



icx) A WINTER OF CONTENT 

Very slowly this bright line widened while 
the snow field grew slate-blue, then purple, 
and the jagged tree line of the forest stood out 
in silhouette, black pines, cedars, and hem- 
locks against a yellow sky. Trees and bushes 
near at hand stole out from the shadows, pat- 
terns of black lace against the white ground, 
and sharply visible. The horizon line was 
now tinged with red, the sky was changing 
to a tender yellow-gray, shading to pale green 
as it neared the zenith. The paling moon 
hung now against a background of rose and 
saffron. The star still blazed above it like a 
lamp, until, suddenly, a fiery streak appeared 
on the horizon, and star and moon faded away 
before the red disk of the sun. 

Toward noon the cold was less intense, and 
I ventured out to get some long-delayed mail 
at the farm. Not a bird was abroad, not a 
rabbit track lay on the paths. In fur coat, 
fur hood, and high rubber boots I plowed 
a way across the lake, where the level snow, 
knee-high, drifted in over the tops of the boots 
and formed an icy crust around my stockinged 
feet. At the farm I learned that the ther- 
mometer at Loon Lake Station had registered 
thirty-five degrees below zero at seven o'clock 



A WINTER OF CONTENT loi 

that morning. Even then, in the sun, on the 
Blakes' south porch it stood at twenty below. 

At home in the afternoon all my little pen- 
sioners were out to greet me. The white- 
breasted nuthatch was clinging, head down, 
on a birch pillar, his head, twisted back at a 
neck-dislocating angle, showed his black cap 
perched over one eye, and gave him an inde- 
scribably rakish, disreputable appearance. 

"Yank, yank," he observed, irritably, as 
though to chide me for keeping him waiting 
so long for food. The air was full of the plain- 
tive winter notes of the chickadees. Peter, 
the rabbit, was sitting hunched against the 
kitchen door, a forlorn little figure. 

The feeding of my live stock has become 
quite a large part of the duty of each day. 
The rabbit waits at the door for his slice of 
bread, and, if that door is left ajar, he is quite 
apt to hop inside and help himself to anything 
he finds standing on the hearth. The squir- 
rel has his toast and cold potato on the wood- 
pile, the birds their crumbs. The bushes 
present a very odd appearance, hung with bits 
of bacon rind for the chickadees. 

The other night there came another little 
boarder, in the person of a very small deer 



I02 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

mouse, that slipped into the cabin and fell 
down between the wire screen and the lower 
casement of the north window. Between the 
netting and the window frame there is space 
enough to make a very satisfactory runway for 
a very tiny mouse, and there he cowered, peer- 
ing at me, with terrified, bright eyes. The 
window panes open in on hinges, like a 
French casement, so my first impulse was to 
shut the upper half and keep him prisoner, 
knowing that if he once ran at large in the 
house I could never catch him, and that he 
would make havoc among the stores. He 
looked so hungry, trembling there, with his 
tiny, pink hands clasped on his breast, that I 
dropped him down a bit of bacon. Then he 
shivered so piteously that I dropped also a 
fluff of absorbent cotton, which he seized and 
instantly made into a little Esquimeau hut. 
This he placed in the corner best sheltered 
from the wind, turned its door in toward the 
glass, and retired, closing that opening with a 
bit of cotton, and I saw him no more by day. 
A deer mouse is the prettiest little beast im- 
aginable, somewhat smaller than the house 
mouse, and with very large eyes. His fur is 
dark brown, very soft and thick and with a 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 103 

darker streak along the spine. His breast is 
white, his legs white too, ending in tiny pink 
paws with wee fingernails, the exact size of 
the eye of a number five needle. His ears are 
long and fringed with black, his head very 
much like the head of a doe. He is noc- 
turnal in habit, staying up in the morning 
until after his breakfast and mine, then retir- 
ing for the day, to come out at twilight and 
run up and down the window screen for exer- 
cise. So long as I keep this window closed 
he can't get out, and I can study him through 
the glass at my leisure. 

Who ever sees a deer mouse at home? 
Walking through the stubble field one some- 
times starts one, and away he goes like a flash. 
Here I have this little wild thing living in my 
house, apparently quite content. He shall 
stay as long as he seems well and happy. When 
I think he is pining he shall go free, but he is 
quite as well ofi in his little hut as he would 
be in the cast-ofif vireo's nest that is, in all 
probability, his winter home. Snow drifts in 
and covers it, to be sure, but he seems snug and 
warm and is growing sleek and fat on a diet 
of bacon and apple. 

Since the coming of the ice I find that I 



I04 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

must keep more cooked stores on hand, not 
only for myself and for the birds and beasts, 
but for the frequent visitors that come driv- 
ing up the lake to the door. They race along 
the ice in sleighs and buggies and stop at the 
island. When they come they stay to the next 
meal, so there must be materials for a party 
always ready. It is only fair to state that the 
rule works quite as well the other way round, 
for I am always welcome to drop in at any 
house near which I happen to be at meal time. 
Any passing guest may draw his chair to the 
table and partake of what is set thereon. No 
apologies are offered for the food. It may 
be only a pot of tea and a biscuit, but what- 
ever it is you are welcome, and that, by your 
leave, is hospitality. 

Oh, Many Islands, place of the good neigh- 
bors! I close my eyes to see picture after pic- 
ture passing across the screen of memory. 
There is Henry Blake giving his time and la- 
bor that my house may be warm and weather 
proof; there is Mary Blake with daily gifts of 
good things to eat and counsel for my inexpe- 
rience. I see the little fishing boats bobbing 
against the rocks as the men stop at the island 
to throw me off a bass and some silver herring 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 105 

as they pass with the day's catch. There are 
John Beaulac's two little girls scrambling 
through the bushes to bring me some venison 
when father has killed a deer, and I see Anna 
Jackson putting a big jug of maple syrup in 
the sleigh that brings me home on a Sunday. 

I see too Granny Drapeau's earnest old 
face, as I hear her say: 

*'Eh, but I was feared for you last night, 
when the wind blowed so strong. I couldn't 
sleep fer thinkin' of you, all alone on that 
island. Come daylight I says to Andy, 'Look 
over an' tell if you kin see her smoke.' For if 
ever that smoke is not a'risin' I'll send one of 
the men over to see what's wrong." 

Daily kindnesses, daily acts of friendliness 
for the stranger woman, who came from no- 
where, to stay awhile and will go away, they 
know not where. 



CHAPTER X 

January the twenty-second was a great day 
in the county. It was the date of the "Tea 
Meeting," given under the auspices of the 
English Church, for the benefit of the desti- 
tute Belgians. It was also a great day for me, 
being the first and the last time that I shall 
appear in Many Islands' society, when society 
meets at night. To drive seven miles in the 
bitter cold, to return to a stone cold house in 
the middle of the night, requires a love of 
foregathering with one's fellows that I do not 
possess. So not until I have trained the rab- 
bit to keep up the fire shall I venture out at 
night again. I had been invited to the fes- 
tivity by Mrs. Jackson weeks before. Having 
very little notion of the proper dress for such 
an occasion, I ventured to ask counsel of a 
young visitor who dropped in opportunely. 

"What do the women wear to the Tea Meet- 
ings here?" I inquired. 

She surveyed me with an appraising eye. 

"Well now," she said, kindly, "haven't you 
a nice, dark waist here with you? A lady of 

1 06 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 107 

your age would naturally wear something 
dark and plain." 

At once I cast away all idea of a service- 
ably plain attire and determined to array my- 
self in all the finery I had with me here; chif- 
fon gown, long gloves and velvet hat with 
plumes. "Lady of my age, indeed!" 

And when I arrived at the entertainment 
every soul was in her best, and my attire en- 
tirely appropriate. I waited with some pleas- 
ant anticipation for the moment when my 
little friend should spy me and was not disap- 
pointed in the expression that swept across 
her pretty face. As a plain dresser I was evi- 
dently not a success. 

The start was to be an early one. In the 
middle of the afternoon I raked out the fire, 
fed the animals, hid the key under the wood- 
pile and started down the lake to the Jackson 
farm, following a fresh-cut sleigh track that 
glittered like a silver ribbon flung down on 
the blue ice. Now and again the solid floor 
under me would give a groan and a heave and 
I would spring aside, my heart in my throat 
despite my knowledge of the two feet of solid 
ice beneath me. Then I would assure my 
quaking spirit that where the woodsleds could 



io8 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

drive I could surely walk, and would travel 
on. 

At Jackson's there was a pot of bean soup 
on the stove, and, as a comforting repast on a 
cold day, I know of nothing that approaches 
hot bean soup — it stays by one. We drove off 
in the big farm sleigh, seven miles to the town 
of Fallen Timber, passing through Sark with 
its five houses and the Cheese Factory, and by 
farms each of which contributed its heavily 
laden sleigh to the long line of vehicles bound 
for the meeting. 

The town hall of Fallen Timber stands on 
a bleak hillside. It is a room, about thirty by 
forty feet in size, with a six-foot wide stage at 
the end and a box stove in the middle. The 
stovepipe goes straight to the ceiling, across, 
and out by a hole in the wall at the back of 
the stage. The walls are of a dirty, leprous- 
looking plaster, with here and there a small 
bunch of ground pine tacked on by way of 
decoration. At the back of the stage a strip 
of once white muslin bore the inscription: 
"Welcome To All" in letters a foot high. 

The seats are planks laid on the stumps of 
trees, the stage curtain is of red and green 
calico. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 109 

Now and again this curtain was pushed 
aside, disclosing the preparations for supper, 
and such piles of cookies, cakes, and sand- 
wiches, I never expect to see again. In the 
phrase of this neighborhood there were cer- 
tainly "plenty of cookings." 

The great folk of the evening were late — 
the rector and his wife, the member of Par- 
liament, who was to preside for us, and the 
orator, who was to address us. But we did 
not mind the delay. We had come to meet 
each other, and the time passed pleasantly 
enough. I was seated almost exactly on the 
stove, ventilation there was none, and the hall 
was packed, but what of that? It was good to 
feel thoroughly warm, at no expense to one- 
self, and there's too much fuss made about 
fresh air anyway — at least in the opinion of 
many of my neighbors. 

The orator was the typical political speaker 
— portly, bland, slightly humorous and very 
approachable. He made an excellent speech, 
outlining the causes that led to the Great War, 
and telling of Germany's policy and her 
hopes. He explained the part that Belgium 
had played, in holding back the tide of inva- 
sion until France had had time to mobilize, 



no A WINTER OF CONTENT 

and it was all very clear and convincing. He 
laid stress on the spontaneous outpouring of 
loyalty in the colonies, and quoted one of the 
first messages received from India — the tele- 
gram from a Rajah that read: *'My Em- 
peror, what work has he for ME and for my- 
people?" 

As he went on to enumerate them — Canada, 
India, Australia, New Zealand and all the 
islands of the seas — I forgot the little hall, the 
crowd, the heat, and caught something of Isa- 
iah's vision of the Great House of God, that 
shall be exalted high above the hills, and of 
the time when all nations shall flow unto it. 

After the speech came supper, huge plates 
of sandwiches and many kinds of cake, with 
pitchers of steaming tea. The men ate three 
and four of these platefuls with as careless an 
air as who should say: "What are five pounds 
or so of food washed down with quarts of 
strong, boiled tea? A mere nothing." 

What was worse, the children ate quite as 
much as their elders, but I have long since 
ceased to forebode anything for the youth of 
this favored land. Apparently, they cannot 
be harmed. 

After supper, at about eleven- thirty, came 



A WINTER OF CONTENT in 

the real object of the meeting — the entertain- 
ment by "local talent." It began with the 
chorus: "Tramp, tramp, tramp, the boys are 
marching." Followed then a recitation, "My 
Aunt Somebody's Custard Pie." 

This was delivered in a coquettish, not to 
say soubrettish manner by a little miss in a 
short white frock, and with a coral ribbon 
wound round her curly, dark hair. Her as- 
sured manner struck me and not pleasantly. 
Later I understood it. She was "Teacher" in 
charge of Number Six, better known as the 
Woodchuck School. I am told that the 
Boards of Education cannot keep these rural 
schools supplied, the girls marry off so fast; 
and I can well believe it, judging by this one. 
She was evidently the belle of the neighbor- 
hood. In the comments that the boys were mak- 
ing all round me the other girls were all very 
well, but "Teacher" was easily the favorite. 

"She's a good teacher," I heard one declare, 
hoarsely fervent. "She's did well by Number 
Six. I could make out every word them chil- 
dren spoke" — a fact that really seemed to give 
him cause for satisfaction. 

The night wore on with drill after drill, 
song after song, recitation after recitation. 



112 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

Despite my fatigue, I was interested. As I 
watched the audience something took me by 
the throat. It was somehow so pathetic. 
Those heavy men, those work-worn women 
were not interested because their children 
were being shown ofif. No indeed. They 
liked the performance because it was just at 
their level, and that fact threw a searchlight 
on the bare monotony of their lives. We fin- 
ished at about two o'clock with "Tipperary," 
and "God Save the King," and, as every 
national anthem is an assault on the feelings 
and makes me cry, I sang and wiped my eyes 
with the rest. 

The night skies here are seldom black, like 
the skies of the south, they are more often a 
soft, misty gray. The stars, instead of being 
sharp little points of light, are big and indis- 
tinct and furry. It is always light enough to 
see the road, even at the dark of the moon. 
We drove along through the bitter cold. Big 
John Beaulac's hired boy, Reginald, stand- 
ing in the back of the sleigh, by way of getting 
a lift home. He was regretting, all the way, 
that some people had not eaten all their "cook- 
ings" and that so much good food had been 
wasted on the floor. I fancied that Reginald 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 113 

Bean would fain have eaten even more than 
he did. 

At the shore we dropped Mrs. Jackson and 
the three little sleeping Jacksons, and drove 
on down the lake. At the narrows I, being 
almost frozen to the seat of the sleigh, in- 
sisted on being set down to walk, and took my 
way along the side of the island, treading in 
the footprints that I had left in the snow when 
I had set out — was it the day or the week be- 
fore? 

I groped my way among the trees and along 
the trail to the house, lighted a fire and looked 
at the clock. I had been walking through 
the woods at four o'clock in the morning, and 
with as little concern as though it had been 
that hour of a summer afternoon. 

Then, as though to rebuke my temerity, I 
was frightened on the lake the very next day. 

I was walking briskly along on the ice, 
singing at the top of my lungs, because just to 
be alive on a day when the air was so cold and 
clean, the sky so blue and the snow crystals so 
brilliant, was happiness, when I came full on 
a figure that robbed the morning of its joy. 

It was Ishmael Beaulac, the imbecile, 
shambling heavily along. He spoke, then 



114 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

turned and followed me some distance, his 
air half menacing, half cringing, and I was 
frightened, for I realized that for miles 
around there was no one to come to my aid, if 
Ishmael should take it into his poor, crazed 
brain to do me harm. But he wandered off 
again, and, as I watched his bent figure shuf- 
fling away in the snow, I was shaken with a 
great compassion. I have never seen a face so 
marked with evil. Lined, swollen, and in- 
flamed with some loathsome eruption, the 
low, receding forehead, with coarse, black 
hair growing almost to the line of the eye- 
brows, a wide, loose-lipped mouth, and cun- 
ning shifty eyes — it is a face that has haunted 
my dreams. 

I asked Rose Beaulac about him. 

"John and I was a sayin' that we'd ought to 
tell you about Ish," she said. "Now that the 
ice is come, likely he'll walk over to the island. 
But don't you be afeared of him. Just make 
out like you're goin' to throw hot water on 
him an' he'll run." 

"Oh, poor creature!" I cried. "I couldn't 
hurt him." 

"It ain't needful to scald him," said Rose, 
with an air of great cunning. "I always holds 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 115 

my finger in the water to see if it's cool enough 
afore I throws it. He's awful 'fraid of water, 
Ish is," she observed, and remembering Ish- 
mael's appearance I could well believe it. 

"But don't you ever make over him," Rose 
went on, "and don't you ever feed him or 
you'll have him there all the time. Don't 
leave any knives or old boots around where 
he can git them. Ish don't know nothin' about 
money; he'll walk right past your purse to 
steal a pair of old boots. But he won't hurt 
you — at least we don't think he will." 

"I have heard that his father. Old John, 
was cruel to him," I ventured, with some 
diffidence, for Old John or Devil Beaulac was 
Little John's own Uncle. 

A look of distress flitted across Rose's face. 

"Old John was a very severe man, very 
severe," she said. "He treated Ishmael awful 
bad. He must have hurted him very hard, 
for now when the men is teasin' him if one of 
them lifts an ax or a spade, and makes to run 
at him, Ish goes perfectely wild. They say 
Old John used to hit him on the head. That 
would make him so crazy-like, wouldn't it? 
Yes, poor Ish has had it awful hard, there's 
none but will tell you that," she sighed. 



ii6 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

The neighbors are less reticent about old 
John. By their account he was a man 
outside all law, a giant in strength and of a 
fiendish cruelty. Finally his tyrannies grew 
intolerable, and his sons set on him, beating 
him until he died. Then they threw his body 
into an old mica pit, filled the pit with stones 
and went their way. No one interfered. The 
old man was thought to have earned his doom 
and the sons were never brought to trial. But 
even now, when poor Ishmael's fits of mad- 
ness come upon him they say he goes to that 
pit and throws great rocks into it, cursing the 
memory of his father. 

Much of this may be untrue, but the story 
haunts me. In the figure of this poor maniac, 
hurling his stones and shouting impotent 
curses to the unheeding sky, I see a time when 
the earth was young, when men dragged the 
offender out from the great congregation and 
stoned him to death before the face of an an- 
gry God. I marvel that in this place so near 
to civilization such stories can still be told. 



CHAPTER XI 

We are no longer tenderfeet, the rabbit 
and I. We have come through a blizzard. 
For the better part of a week we have been 
"denned in" along with the squirrels, chip- 
munks, coons, bobcats, and bears. We have 
melted snow for drinking water, because the 
drifts cut us off from the lake and buried the 
waterhole. We have dug our firewood out 
from under a pile of wet whiteness. The 
mouse came through safely too, although the 
snow sifted in through the window screen, and 
covered him, house and all. 

The storm began on the second of Febru- 
ary, in the evening. All night long the wind 
howled with a violence that threatened to lift 
the house bodily and deposit it out on the lake. 
It searched out every crack and crevice, chill- 
ing me to the bone. It wrenched and tore at 
the heavy wooden shutters, it tossed and 
twisted the trees, every now and again throw- 
ing one to the ground with a grinding crash. 
It whistled, it moaned; and, with it came the 
snow, in blinding, whirling gray clouds that 

"7. 



ii8 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

blotted out everything. The lake was ob- 
scured, the outlines of the neighboring islands 
were lost. I could see only a smother of drift- 
ing, dancing flakes. 

The day passed fairly well, for the mere 
necessity of keeping up the fire was an occu- 
pation in itself. 

"This," said I to Peter, "is the beginning of 
the true Canadian winter. I hope it does not 
stay too long." 

Peter, having been born last summer, has 
had no experience of any other winter. No 
memories of former blizzards troubled him. 
He hoped that the bread would hold out. 

At about three o'clock in the afternoon 
Satan inspired me to go out on the porch, to 
survey the prospect. Immediately I smelled 
smoke. 

Now, there is but one thing of which I have 
been afraid, and that is fire. A blaze started 
here would inevitably sweep the island and no 
one could stop it. I smelled tar paper burn- 
ing. 

"What a pleasant thing it would be to bor- 
row the cherished summer camp of a friend 
and burn it down for her! What a safe thing 
for oneself it would be to go to sleep in a 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 119 

smoldering house and have it break into 
flames in the night." 

I sniffed and sniffed despairingly. I scram- 
bled out into the snow to examine the chim- 
neys ; I burrowed under the porch floor to look 
at the foundations; I climbed the ladder to 
make sure of the roof, and still that smell of 
burning tar persisted. I had a horrible mis- 
giving that there was fire smoldering between 
the outer and the inner walls. 

There was nothing for it but to get to the 
Blakes and tell them of my fears. If Henry 
could assure me that there was no way of a 
fire's starting, I would believe him and go to 
bed content. If I had not that assurance, I 
should be forced to sit up all night waiting to 
escape into the snow. Whatever the weather 
I had to get to the farm ; that was all I could 
think of. 

I dressed as warmly as I could and set forth, 
through the drifts, to the edge of the island. 
I made fair progress until I stepped off the 
land on to the lake. Then I began to have 
some idea of what I, in my ignorance, had un- 
dertaken. 

The lake was like the ocean done in snow. 
The wind had piled great breakers of snow 



I20 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

one behind another, their crests curled over 
at the top, exactly like the waves on a beach. 
Only these breakers were curled over the op- 
posite way. They turned over toward the 
wind, not away from it. One long ridge fol- 
lowed another with a deep, scooped out fur- 
row to windward. Looking down on the lake 
from the level of the porch, these waves did 
not look very high. When I stepped off into 
them they came up to my armpits. 

Even then I had not sense to turn back; 
even then I had no idea of any real danger. 
The wind was at my back. I could feel it 
behind me like a wall, as I climbed through 
each succeeding hillock of snow and out 
across the intervening three or four yards of 
level ice. Wave followed wave, each higher, 
deeper, more suffocating than the last. Some- 
times I could walk for a few feet on the top of 
a drift before sinking into its depths. I scram- 
bled, fell, rolled, crawled, climbed, and 
thought that I should never reach the shore. 
Counting helped me, as I pulled each foot 
up out of the clinging mass and set it down 
a few inches nearer the land. 

*'One, two, three, four," I said aloud, tim- 
ing my steps to the pounding of my laboring 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 121 

heart. My breath was coming in gasps, a 
pulse beat in my temples, my head swam, 
there was a ringing in my ears as I plodded 
on, now with eyes shut. 

A thin, washed out moon came out and 
looked through wisps of ragged clouds. Its 
light served only to make the scene more deso- 
late, the distance from the shore more terrify- 
ing. The only idea that remained in my 
stupified brain was that I must somehow find 
strength to go on lifting heavy feet one after 
the other; that I must struggle up from each 
fall, must breathe deep and keep a quiet mind. 

At last I reached the deeper drifts that 
fringed the shore, skirted the hidden water- 
hole, found traces of the cattle tracks, dragged 
myself along the path and finally stepped, 
with the very last remnant of strength, up on 
the porch and into the warm bright kitchen. 
When Mary Blake caught sight of me, she sat 
down suddenly and said: ''My God!" 

They had not attempted to get to the water 
hole that day, but had given the cattle melted 
snow. They had gone only as far as the barn 
and henhouses. Even the house dog had 
stayed indoors. 

I gasped out my fears and Henry Blake 



€22 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

laughed at them. There was no way, he said, 
for a fire to have started and if one had caught, 
the house would have been flat to the ground 
long before I had crossed the lake. 

I heard him with disgust. If that was the 
way my panic looked, it was high time for me 
to return to my home on the island. I rose 
with much dignity and walked off to the shore, 
before the Blakes had adjusted their minds to 
the move. 

This time the wind was in my face, making 
the going ten times harder than before. About 
forty yards out from shore I stopped and 
turned my back to the blast to catch my 
breath, and there was Henry, dressed in his 
great fur coat, striding out after me and look- 
ing for all the world like a bear on its hind 
legs. 

When I saw his thickset figure struggling 
against the gale it seemed suddenly a hatefully 
inconsiderate thing to have brought him away 
from his warm fire and out into the storm and 
I called: 

"Go back, Mr. Blake. There is no fire. 
Don't attempt to come after me." 

But Henry only stumped on. 

"I know there's nothing burning," he re- 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 123 

torted. "We're a long way more worried 
about you than we are about the camp. You 
might get confused and lose your life in this 
storm." 

On he went ahead of me and I was thank- 
ful to follow humbly in his footsteps. 

We reached the house, and, as we stood in 
the warm room fighting for breath, I said: 

"Mr. Blake, there is some Scotch here. 
Will you drink some?" And Henry said he 
would. 

After that I was content to stay indoors un- 
til he came with the horses and broke the 
tracks through the island. 

Such heaps of snow lay piled on the lake 
and in the woods that it should have taken 
months for it to disappear; but in three days 
there came a thaw and melted it all away. 

The thaw came not a day too soon, for the 
sixteenth was the time set for the long antici- 
pated sawing bee at the farm. During January 
Henry Blake and Jimmie had been felling 
trees and dragging them to the house in pre- 
paration for the arrival of the perambulating 
sawmill, that goes from farm to farm as soon 
as the ice will hold. There was a pile of logs, 
ten feet high by thirty feet long piled butt end 



124 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

to in the dooryard. When a farmer announces 
a bee his neighbors gather from far and near, 
leaving their own work to help him put 
through the particular job in hand. He is ex- 
pected to attend their bees in return. The 
farmer's wife, who earns a high seat in heaven 
if ever woman did, works for days before- 
hand, cooking for the ten or a dozen hungry 
men who will come down on her for dinner, 
supper and, perhaps, breakfast, with a night's 
lodging thrown in. 

Mary Blake had made bread of the lightest 
and finest, had killed chickens, taken fish out 
of brine, and pork from the barrel; had made 
cakes and pies ; had brought out pickles and 
preserves, and when I arrived she was cream- 
ing carrots and onions and boiling the inevi- 
table potatoes. 

It was a cold, gray day, with the surface of 
the lake awash. As I splashed my way 
through the water, ankle-deep on the ice, I 
heard the saw, clear and high, like the note of 
a violin. There were ten men working at the 
bee. The little gasoline engine was drawn 
up on a bobsled at the kitchen door, and even 
as early as ten o'clock it had eaten out a big 
hole in the side of the stack of logs. William 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 125 

Foret and Jock McDougal were at the ma- 
chine shoveling snow into the boiler, William 
in a bright blue jersey and with a squirrel 
skin cap set at an angle over his dark, eager 
face. Henry Blake was at the wheel, to take 
the sawed-off chunks from the feeders and 
throw them to the pile. The rhythm of his 
movements was exact. A reach toward the 
wheel, a heave, a toss over his shoulder to the 
ever-increasing pile of chunks and a return to 
the wheel — all this at the rate of a chunk 
every three seconds. This position, being the 
hardest work, is always taken by the host at a 
bee. 

Little John Beaulac, Tom Jackson and 
Uncle Dan Cassidy lifted the logs and carried 
them to the saw, where Black Jack held them 
against the blade. There were two or three 
extra men standing ready to take up the work 
when one or more should be exhausted. 

In the midst of the fray a sleigh was sighted, 
far out on the ice. It was bringing Jim Mc- 
Nally from far back of the mica mine. He 
had heard of the bee and had come, at a ven- 
ture, for fear that Henry might be "short- 
handed." He brought a pail of fresh eggs for 
Mary Blake and a great sack of turnips. 



126 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

There was a mighty skurry and mystery about 
slipping a bag of salt fish under the seat of 
the sleigh, for him to find when he reached 
home. 

At half past eleven the men trooped in to 
dinner, with many facetious remarks about 
the strength of their appetites and the advis- 
ability of letting the dirtiest man wash first. 

After a very short smoke time they were at 
work again and I sat at the kitchen window, 
watching the saw bite through the big logs. 
The men's rhythmic movements, the swift in- 
terplay of the bright colors of their jerseys, 
the long scream of the toothed blade, all lulled 
me to vacuity of mind. Long after dark, when 
I was back at home, I could hear the sound 
of the wheel coming across the lake. That 
song of the saw tells me just where the mill is 
working for the day. Going out on the porch 
I can tell whether the bee is at Blake's, Dra- 
peau's, Foret's or the mines. 

The Blakes are very up to date in their use 
of the gasoline engine. Many of the farmers 
still use the old treadmill, where four teams 
of horses walk round and round all day, turn- 
ing the wheel. Invited to a bee at the Jack- 
sons', the other day, I took a camera along, 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 127 

for a picture of the old tread will soon be a 
treasured possession. The men had paused in 
their work in the kindest way to allow them- 
selves to be "took." I was walking, with 
great dignity, down the slippery hillside, when 
a treacherous bit of ice was my undoing. I 
fell and my demoralization was complete. 

Camera flew one way, walking staff an- 
other, arms and legs spread out to the four 
points of the compass, as I went shooting 
down that hill. When I had gathered my 
scattered members and my wits together, and 
was scrambling up with the foolish grin of the 
newly fallen, I looked appealingly at the saw- 
ing gang, expecting to hear the inevitable 
laugh. Not a face did I see. Every man's 
back was turned. The picture was taken amid 
a sounding silence. 

Commenting on that display of good man- 
ners to Uncle Dan, I said fervently: "Never 
in my life did I see such perfect breeding. It 
is almost impossible to help laughing when 
anyone falls, but not one of those men smiled. 
I never expected such politeness." 

Uncle Dan's Irish eyes twinkled. 

"You'd ought to have heard what the b'ys 
said when you left," he observed. 



128 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

Pondering that cryptic remark, I am in- 
clined to think that it is just as well that I do 
not know all that is being said of me in the 
work gangs and around the kitchen fires of 
Many Islands. 



CHAPTER XII 

How do we know when the turn of 
the year has come? The calendar gives 
March twenty-first as the official birthday of 
spring, but that has nothing to do with it. 
One February day will be all winter, hard 
frozen and dreary, and on the next, quite sud- 
denly, through some spirit line of sense, a 
message will reach us that spring, her very 
self, is on the way. After that, no matter how 
many days of sleet and snow may follow, we 
know that for us the winter is past. 

So it was yesterday, here on the island. 
With a mind adjusted to the thought of weeks 
of snow and ice to come, I stepped out of 
doors and into the spring. The air was balmy 
as May, the sky a turquoise and the lake a 
pearl. The furry gray buds of the poplars 
had puffed out in the night. The three little 
fingers of the birches were swelling and 
lengthening. Suddenly my eyes were dazzled 
by a flash of bright blue light, and a magni- 
ficent jay darted through the air and perched 
on the bare branch of a basswood. After the 

129 



I30 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

small, drab-hued chickadees and nuthatches, 
that jay looked as large as an eagle. Then 
I looked at little Peter, and lo! he was turn- 
ing brown. The white hairs of his winter 
coat were falling off, his spring jacket was 
showing through. 

The ground under the trees is dusted over 
with myriads of brown scales, chief among 
them the bird-shaped pods of the birches, that 
carry two wee seeds under their pinions. In 
the open the snow is gray with patches of 
briskly hopping snow fleas that move along 
over the meadows at a lively rate. The na- 
ture books tell me that these are insects that 
live in the mosses and lichens, and that they 
come out on warm days for exercise. They 
are exercising for dear life to-day. 

Here and there on the white carpet are the 
fairy writings left by the wind last night. It 
bent down the dry tips of the sedges, and 
traced circles, bows, triangles, mystic runes 
that look as though they meant great news, 
if one could only read them. 

But the snow still covers the ground. Ru- 
fus still tunnels under it, shaking the crust 
violently when he goes in for some hidden 
store of food. The rabbit roads, pressed hard 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 131 

by hundreds of small, skurrying feet, still run 
crisscross under the cedars, and the heavy 
woodsleds still travel down the middle of the 
lake, like giant caterpillars, crawling along 
Behind the opposite island the men are cut- 




"THE HEAVY WOODSLEDS STILL TRAVEL DOWN 
THE LAKES'' 



ting ice. Uncle Dan stands at the side of a 
dark pool of open water, and works away 
with a saw as tall as himself. The rec- 
tangular blocks, two feet thick, slide up the 
inclined boards to the sleds and are driven 



132 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

off to the icehouses in preparation for the 
summer's shipment of fish to the towns. They 
are beautiful, those blocks of ice, so clear and 
clean and blue. 

With the fine weather has come the news 
that the Rector of the English Church and 
Mrs. Rector are coming to the island for a 
visit. The island is in much excitement. Salt 
bacon and potatoes do not seem just the right 
fare to offer guests so important and who are 
coming from afar. \ly mind is set on chicken, 
and the word has gone forth round the lake 
that "the English minister is coming and the 
woman on the island wants a fowl." 

Now, all our turkeys, ducks, and chickens 
are fattened for the fowl fair, held at Queens- 
port in December, when the poultry dealers 
from Toronto and Montreal, and even from 
"The States," go through the country buying 
up the stock. The greater part of the yearly 
income of some of us depends on the prices 
paid for the fowl. My only chance of having 
chickens through the winter was to engage a 
neighbor to save me a dozen young cockerels 
and to pay him for their feed, having them 
killed as needed. I had long ago eaten all 
these chickens and the prospect of getting any 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 133 

more was slight. Even Rose Beaulac, fertile 
in resource, could give me no hope. 

I never found the chicken, but I had a visit 
from Rose the day before the party. She told 
me that she had given John his gun and had 
sent him up Loon Bay to shoot me some 
grouse. Then the conversation languished. 
Rose is a very shy little vv^oman; it took her 
nearly an hour to come to the real point of her 
call. She would not lay aside her coonskin 
coat, she would not remove her dingy tuque; 
there she sat, struggling with her errand. 

At last it came out: 

"Might she bring the baby to be christened 
when the Rector came?" 

Then for another half hour she rambled on 
about people who never had their babies chris- 
tened and what a sin that was, and of those 
who never registered their children's births, 
and how those children could never inherit 
property. Once in a while she said something 
about things "not being legal," until I was 
quite bewildered and do not know to this day 
whether, in her opinion, the unbaptlzed or the 
unregistered infant is not legal. But the up- 
shot of it all was that the youngest Beaulac 
was to be christened next day. 



134 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

The hour set for service was two o'clock, 
but such was Mrs. Beaulac's determination 
not to be late that she and the baby's eldest 
sister arrived at eleven. There was no sign 
of the father, John Beaulac. There I had 
made my mistake. I had let him know that 
a sponsor would be needed and that he was 
expected to stand. So when the godfather was 
demanded none could be found. 

"Where was John?" 

"Gone to Queensport with a load of wood." 

"Andy Drapeau, the baby's uncle?" 

"Gone to Glen Avon." 

The other uncles were ofif hunting at Loon 
Lake; Louis, the eldest brother, had disap- 
peared entirely. So when the time came for 
sponsors, the Rector's wife and I had to stand, 
and for this poor baby, whose father owns not 
one rod of ground, and who is sheltered in a 
hovel built for the cattle, we gravely re- 
nounced "the vain pomp and glory of the 
world." And because, in my hurry, I had 
forgotten to temper the water in the impro- 
vised font, the new little soldier and servant 
of Christ yelled valiantly when the ice water 
touched him. 

It was a scene I shall not forget: the cabin, 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 135 

with its bunk in one corner, its big stove at 
one end, the pots and pans on the wall behind 
it; the tools; the fishing tackle and the stores. 
The Rector, wearing white surplice and em- 
broidered stole, stood in the center of the room 
beside the white-covered table that held the 
bowl of water and the Prayer Book. 

Old Mrs. Drapeau, the baby's grand- 
mother, had crept across the ice to witness 
the baptism, the first she had seen, she said, 
in twenty years. 

The meeting closed with tea and cake; then 
the christening party withdrew, the little new 
Christian sleeping peacefully in the wooden 
box in which his mother dragged him away 
over the ice. 

We three who were left settled to dinner 
and a long afternoon's talk. At teatime the 
Rector observed that the Woodchuck School 
was a mere seven miles away, and that he 
might as well have a service there while he 
was so near. So we dashed away across the 
lake, used telephones freely to collect a con- 
gregation, opened the school house, and, by 
the light of two guttering candles, said our 
prayers, sang our hymns, and listened to a 
simple, direct, and practical sermon. Back 



136 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

across the ice I drove in the flare of the north- 
ern lights, that made the night almost as 
bright as day. 

The Rector is a young man and an ener- 
getic one — and he has need to be — for his par- 
ish covers much ground. It extends from the 
church at Queensport, out to Godfrey's Mills, 
fifteen miles away to the south, and back to 
Fallen Timber, twelve miles to the north. 
Besides these three churches he has four or 
five irregular stations in the schoolhouses 
dotted about within the radius of his activi- 
ties. On Sunday mornings he teaches the 
Sunday school at Queensport and holds serv- 
ice there; in the afternoon he drives to the 
Mills, and has Sunday school and Evening 
Prayer, at night there is service at Fallen 
Timber. Up and down the roads he drives, 
day after day, visiting the sick, baptizing the 
children, burying the dead. He consoles, ad- 
monishes, encourages; he reproves our negli- 
gences, bears with our foolishnesses, and 
somehow contrives to have patience with our 
ignorance. 

Being a churchman to whom the decency 
and orthodoxy of services are dear, it is hard 
for him to excuse our lax ways. It gives him 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 137 

genuine distress when we know no better than 
to drape our flags over the cross, and his face 
is set against the to us very pleasing dec- 
oration furnished by house plants growing in 
tin cans and set upon the altar. When he 
marches up the aisle and removes these at- 
tempts at ornament, replaces the vases and the 
cross where they belong, we say nothing. It 
is evident that we have made a mistake in our 
zeal. We don't try that again, but something 
else that proves just as reprehensible. But 
we are learning — the Rector sees to that. If 
only the Bishop will let him stay, we shall 
be good churchmen after awhile. But we say 
proudly and sorrowfully: "He's too good for 
a small parish like this. He'll be moved to 
the city soon." 

The only way the Rector spares himself is 
in the matter of writing sermons. He con- 
fessed to me that he did not write three new 
ones a week, but preached the same one at all 
three churches, thereby reserving, I suppose, 
a few hours for sleep. 

And with all this unceasing effort — and the 
clergy of all denominations work just as hard 
— there are families living here round Many 
Islands that have never entered a church. 



138 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

They are as veritable heathen as any on the 
far frontier. There was a death at a farm 
on the road to Loon Lake station last week. 
The body was put into a rough box, thrust 
into a shallow grave, and the work of the 
farm went straight on. And the English rec- 
tor, the Roman Catholic priest, the Meth- 
odist preacher and the Presbyterian minister 
all live within a radius of twenty miles. 

Strange country, so civilized and so primi- 
tive, so close to cities and so inaccessible. 
Strange people, at once so old and so young, 
so instructed in vice and sorrow, and so ig- 
norant of the simplest teachings of life. 
Grown men and women in body but children 
in mind, with children's virtues and with 
adults' sins. 



CHAPTER XIII 

Since the first of December we have not 
seen the ground — only a great field of white 
so dazzling that one understands the Indian's 
name for the March moon. Verily, my own 
eyes tell me why it is the Moon of Snowblind- 
ness. 

The ice is still thick and clear, but the sun 
on its surface and the moving water beneath 
are both wearing it away, slowly, surely. 
There are clear pools on the lake at noon, and 
then the crows come down and drink, march- 
ing to and fro, like files of small, black-clad 
soldiers. They meet, and bow politely, speak 
to each other singly or in groups, then line up 
and off they go with hoarse caws. They look 
so important that they might be plotting all 
sorts of villainies. 

"Look out fer yerself," laughs Uncle Dan. 
"I'll put the curse of the crows on yer." 

A dire threat! What use to break one's 
back planting the corn if one's evilly disposed 
neighbor can call winged battalions of those 
black thieves to undo all a man's work and 
bring him to penury? 

139 



140 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

The snow is still thick in the woods, but on 
the hilltops and in the open, bare patches of 
earth are beginning to show. Peter's coat 
matches the ground exactly, being a sharply 
mottled brown and white. Indeed, he never 
did turn entirely white, like the wild hares 
in the woods. Even when his fur was its 
snowiest there was always a brown, diamond- 
shaped patch on his forehead, and, so far as 
I know, he was the only hare so decorated. 
No matter how far from home he strayed, I 
could always recognize him by his brown 
brand. 

This simple life has its inconveniences. I 
was eating a belated breakfast the other morn- 
ing, when bells on the lake and later a sleigh 
at the door announced a visitor. It was a 
perfectly unknown man who informed me 
that he had been sent by Mrs. Swanson to 
bring me to her house to spend the day. He 
had to wait outside, in the piercing wind, un- 
til a hasty glance round the combined sleep- 
ing, cooking, and reception room reassured 
me as to its condition for the entrance of a 
stranger. Then he sat beside the stove, pipe 
in hand, and inspected me gravely while I 
prepared for the long drive down the lake. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 141 

The day was bright and blue and snap- 
ping cold. A point of light flashed from 
every facet of the roughened ice. The horse 
was fresh, the wind at our backs, and we 
fairly flew past Jackson's, over the bare roads 
and out again on beautiful Blue Bay, lying 
like a sapphire in its setting of silvered 
shores. 

The pony was a broncho, my companion 
told me, calling my attention to a brand to 
prove it. He was all that, and a tree-climb- 
ing broncho to boot, for soon we came to a 
perpendicular bank as high as the side of a 
barn, and I was given to understand that the 
pony was going to clamber straight up, with 
the sleigh dangling at his heels. I left the 
vehicle and scrambled up on my own feet, but 
the animal went up the side of that hill like 
a cat at a wall, and without one second's hesi- 
tation. 

Arrived at the house I inquired of my hos- 
tess if my escort was her son. 

"Oh, no," she answered. "It was only 
Clarence Nutting, the hired man." 

Evidently, "hired man" means something 
very different here from what it has hitherto 
meant to me. It means friend, protector, 



142 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

helper, and member of the family. Mrs. 
Swanson, Susie Dove, the hired girl, Clar- 
ence Nutting, and I all dined together; after 
dinner we played dominoes. When Clarence 
brought in the fresh eggs from the barn he 
suggested: ^'Better give Miss X some to take 
home with her." Later he invited me to come 
back, and soon, to spend several days. 

Through the long, sunny afternoon, we sat 
round the stove in the pleasant best room, with 
its well-starched lace curtains, each with a 
bunch of artificial roses sewed on its folds, its 
oak sideboard decorated with rose-bordered 
crepe paper napkins, its crayon portraits and 
wonderful, hand-made hooked rugs. We 
women had our crocheting, but little Susie 
sat very upright, her small, work-roughened 
hands clasped on her plaid-covered knees, her 
toes, in their shiny best shoes, just reaching 
the floor, while Clarence played for us on his 
new graphophone. 

Clarence, in his high boots, patched trous- 
ers, and flannel shirt, handled his music box 
with the tenderness of a lover. He dusted 
each record after using it, as carefully as a 
mother powders a baby. As he played tune 
after tune, I saw in that instrument, God 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 143 

knows what of pleasures foregone, and temp- 
tations put aside while he saved out of his 
meager wages the price of that graphophone. 
He had discovered a way to use the thorns 
from a hawthorn tree instead of wooden 
needles. They gave a very soft and lovely 
tone. His records were the usual collection 
sold with the machine — a few dances, a few 
Negro dialects and songs, some good marches 
and some hymns. After nearly a year of 
hearing no tunes at all, I enjoyed them, every 
one. When the concert was over, Clarence 
played: "God be with you till we meet 
again." 

After tea came the sleigh and we drove 
home to the island, this time in a blinding 
snowstorm. Conversation was not so lively 
as in the morning. I was thinking of all the 
evidences I see here of man's unquenchable 
thirst for beauty and music and the pleasant 
things of life, that not the most incessant toil 
nor hardest privation can ever wholly de- 
stroy. I was remembering how I had gone 
over to the Blakes' to use the telephone one 
afternoon and had had to wait for an hour 
because Clarence Nutting's new instrument 
had come, and all the receivers on the line 



144 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

were down while he played it for the neigh- 
borhood. I thought of poor Harry Sprig- 
gins's delight in a magazine, of Mary Blake^s 
habit of keeping a glass of fresh flowers in the 
center of her table, of the time when Mrs. 
Drapeau, having no white tablecloth, had 
spread a clean sheet over her table for com- 
pany, and of the Beaulacs' joy in the blossom- 
ing of their lilac bush. 

Then I began dreaming of a big, comfort- 
able shack somewhere on the shore, to which 
the people could come, as to a common meet- 
ing ground, social differences and local feuds 
forgotten. I saw it furnished with a cupboard 
full of cups and plates, a piano or victrola. 
There should be a circulating library there 
and games, I decided, and I saw the boys and 
girls dancing, singing, cooking popcorn, 
candy and fudge, in the evenings. I imagined 
a group of women drinking tea and sewing 
while "teacher" played. 

A few days later I went with the Rector 
and Mrs. Rector to drink tea with the wife 
of the owner of a big lumber mill, and there 
I saw what one woman has done amid just 
such conditions as are here at Many Islands. 

There were the pretty little church, the 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 145 

parish house, the Sunday school room, all 
built by Mrs. Baring, and I heard of the read- 
ing circles, the concerts, the cooking classes 
that she has organized for the people among 
whom she has had to live. 

There too I saw the Canadian mother in 
war times and marveled at her. Mrs. Bar- 
ing has sent the light of her eyes, the pride of 
her heart, the son who was winning honors 
at his university and had a great future before 
him, overseas to the trenches. I saw picture 
after picture of him — Harold as a baby, as a 
child, as a boy, as a man. He was shown in 
his little knickers, his first long trousers, his 
khaki. 

"Yes, he is in France now, but of course 
we do not know where," the mother said. "I 
send him two pairs of socks, some handker- 
chiefs and shirts every week. The boys like 
that better than one large box occasionally — 
they lose their clothes so. We hope that 
things reach him, but we do not know. We 
have not heard from him for two months 
now." 

All this without a tremor of the firm lips, 
with not the shadow of a cloud over the serene 
blue eyes. 



146 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

The Rector told me afterward that not once 
has that mother aUiided to the possibility of 
her son's return. She gave her supreme gift 
without hope of any reward. Withal her in- 
terest in affairs is as keen, her charities as 
wide, her hospitality as gracious, as though 
she had never a care in the world and her boy 
were safe at her side. 

After supper we climbed over the slippery 
hillside to the church for Evensong. Our hos- 
tess sat at the organ at the side of the chancel 
and in full view of the congregation. During 
the service I watched her calm, clear pro- 
file. She went through the intolerably pa- 
thetic petitions of the Litany without waver- 
ing, as we prayed for those who are fighting 
by land and sea and air; for the prisoners, the 
wounded and the dying, and her sweet, steady 
voice led our responses. Only once did I see 
her falter. It was during the singing of the 
hymn. Her pretty ringed fingers went on 
pressing the keys; she played, but she could 
not sing. 

"The Son of God goes forth to war, 
A kingly crown to gain, 
His blood-red banner streams afar, 
Who follows in his train?" 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 147 

Her eyes looked past us, straight across the 
world. Her lips were parted in a smile sad- 
der than tears. She was shedding her heart's 
blood, drop by drop, for the safety of the 
empire. 

We do not talk much about the Great War 
here at Many Islands. Indeed, it is only 
when I go to the towns that I realize that 
Canada is at war. Once in a while one of 
our boys speaks of going to the front, and only 
the other day Andy Drapeau was saying, "Ef 
it comes to drafting, I'll volunteer. I'll fight 
of me own free will. No man shall make me 

go." 

But at that, Andy was merely talking. He 
had no idea of enlisting. 

No, as always, it is the men of the cities 
who will go first, and the reason is not far to 
seek. It lies in the fact that the bucolic mind 
is almost totally devoid of imagination — it 
cannot picture what it has never seen. It 
can form no vision of an empire. It can think 
of this county as part of the Province and the 
Province as part of the Dominion, but of 
Canada as part of a great federation it can- 
not conceive — the thought is too big. Our 
vision is bounded by the limits of our own 



148 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

experience. We know that Britain, France, 
and Russia are fighting Germany and Austria, 
but the fields of Europe lie very far away, 
while our own fields are very near. 

We all know Germans. We have worked 
beside them in the hayfields and the mines. 
They seem good fellows enough, not com- 
panionable because they speak an outlandish 
sort of lingo that we doubt their being able to 
understand themselves. But why should we 
fight them? Of the Hun we can form no idea, 
thank God. He is outside our experience. 

We have a patriotism, but it is local, paro- 
chial. If this war were a baseball game be- 
tween the rival teams of Sark and Fallen 
Timber, we could understand it fast enough. 
We would "root" for our side and, if need be, 
fight for it. But the far-ofif struggle of na- 
tion with nation leaves us cold. We cannot 
picture it. 

But when the first wounded came back 
from the trenches, and when the stories of 
Saint Julien and Festhubert were told at the 
firesides, then went the men of rural Canada 
forward gladly to fill the places of those 
heroes whose deaths are Canada's undying 
glory. 



CHAPTER XIV 

Appropriately enough, on this first day of 
the calendar spring, I am warned that the ice 
is unsafe and that I must stay on the island 
until the lake is open water. The natives still 
venture out, but they know the look of the 
thin spots and even they are very cautious. 
Two men started over from mainland this 
morning, axes on shoulder, hounds at heel, but 
they turned back at the shore, and the dogs, 
after stepping daintily on the dark, spongy 
crust, turned back also. The middle of the 
lake is still hard, but there are ditches of water 
round the edges of the land. The ice has 
heaved up into long fissures stretching away 
from the points, the clear green water show- 
ing between their open sides, and from this 
island to the Blakes' point there is a great 
crevasse. 

Mary declares that she has known Henry 
to start off in a sleigh over the lake when the 
ice was only three inches thick; when he had 
to drive fast to keep from breaking in and 
when the water spurted up from the holes 

• 149 



i^o A WINTER OF CONTENT 

made by the horse's hoofs. But Henry was 
going for the mail, and when he has been de- 
prived of news for two or three weeks, the pa- 
pers become things to risk one's life for — 
which is proof that Henry will never be a true 
Many Islander. The rest of us are quite will- 
ing to wait until spring, if need be. 

So I am "denned in" once more, and before 
I am free all sorts of things will have hap- 
pened. There will be hundreds of little new 
calves and lambs lying beside their mothers in 
the meadows, and scores of thin-legged colts 
running beside the mares in the pastures. I 
shall also be shut in when the sap buckets 
hang in the "sugar bush" and the great black 
kettles steam over the fires in the dooryards, 
and I can only hope that some of my friends 
will remember to put my name in the pot, and 
to save me some syrup and some maple sugar. 

Forced to take my exercise on the island, I 
find new things everywhere, as I tramp round 
and round the trails. The snow under the 
evergreens is covered with last year's dry 
needles; the hemlocks, pines and cedars are 
putting on their new, bright green fringes. 
Under the rotting leaves, innumerable little 
new plants are pushing up, princess fern, wild 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 151 

strawberry, Canada mayflower, and countless 
other small weeds and herbs, whose names I 
do not know. When the leaves and needles 
are raked away each stalk is seen standing in 
a tiny pool of clear ice. 

The spring peepers are whistling in the 
lowlands, the hylodes blows his little bagpipe, 
away in the wood the grouse is "beating his 
throbbing drum" — no other description fits 
that thrilling sound — and the first honeybees 
are buzzing out from a clump of birches and 
winging away over the lake. Underneath all 
the other spring sounds is the measured 
"tonk-tonk" of the air escaping through the 
holes in the ice, and the thin, silver sound of 
trickling streams. 

The red-headed woodpecker is here, his 
crown a spot of splendid crimson against the 
snow. "Ker-r-ruck, ker-r-ruck," he cries as 
he darts from tree to tree, his white tail cov- 
erts flashing in the sunlight. 

There has been a deer on the island. 
Through my dreams one night I heard sounds 
of a great commotion, the cries of dogs, the 
crashing of animals through the underbrush. 
In the morning, not ten paces from the kitchen 
door, the snow was all trampled, soiled and 



1^2 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

covered with bunches of long brown hair. 
Evidently, the place was the scene of the poor 
animal's agony, for those hairs were soaked 
with blood. 

I grieved, for I have liked to think that the 
island was a place of refuge for all hunted 
things — at least for this one year. But if the 
dogs had dragged down the deer and killed 
him, what had become of the carcass? I won- 
dered. They could not have eaten it so clean 
that no trace of skin or bones remained. I 
pondered this as I followed the deer's small, 
shapely hoof-prints from the shore and up 
over the hill and through the bushes all hung 
with bunches of tell-tale brown hair. I 
traced the dogs' tracks also, as they crossed 
and recrossed the trail, and following them 
came to an old mica pit, hidden far back 
among the cedars a gash in the hillside, ten 
or twelve feet deep and four or five yards 
long, ringed round with bushes and with a 
young birch growing in its depths. Indeed, I 
fell headlong into that hidden pitfall, and 
had time to hope, as I went down, scrambling 
over the edge and clutching at branches, that I 
was not going to land full on a wounded deer. 

All tracks stopped at this pit, and the mys- 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 153 

tery remained a mystery until late in the 
spring, when it leaked out that Andy and 
George Drapeau had heard the cries of the 
hounds, had watched their chance, had come 
over, dragged off the dogs, and skinned and 
carried away the deer. 

Now the season for hunting deer lasts from 
November first to November fifteenth. Only 
one deer may be shot by each hunter. No 
hounds may be allowed to run at large during 
the closed season and any dog found running 
a deer may be shot on sight, and the person 
shooting this dog may not be prosecuted. 
Thus the month of March is not the time 
for fresh venison. Venison out of season is 
''mountain goat," to be eaten privately and 
without boastfulness. Nor is it safe to display 
a deer's spring coat. But if the Drapeaus had 
left me that hide, would I have informed on 
their dogs? I wonder. 

My own stupidity robbed me of the only 
other deerskin rug that I might have had. 
Little John Beaulac offered me a beautiful 
— and seasonable — one which I bought and 
sent to the squaw at Maskinonge for tanning. 
Some weeks later I mentioned my good for- 
tune to William Foret. 



154 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

"Are you having the hair left on?" he 
asked. 

"Hair left on!" I echoed. "Of course. I 
never heard of having the hair taken off. I 
want the skin for a rug." 

"Well, you'd ought to have said so," said 
William. "Mostly they tans them for leather 
round here. They makes fine moccasins and 
mittens." 

Sure enough, that Indian woman had pa- 
tiently scraped off all the hair and I received 
a superfine piece of buckskin, which was pre- 
sented to Little John, I having no use in the 
world for moccasins or mittens when I should 
return to the city. 

The Drapeaus live on a long peninsula to 
the west of this island and half a mile away. 
From this dock I see their barns in silhouette 
against the sunsets. Their land rises in fold 
on fold of meadow, with here and there a 
clump of cedars or maples, then a soft slope 
and slanting cornfield. Their house is the typi- 
cal Canadian log shack, a building about six- 
teen by twenty feet, divided by a board par- 
tition into a kitchen and a tiny bedroom. A 
trap door opens into the cellar; a ladder leads 
up to the loft where the boys sleep. There 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 155 

is a shed, built at right angles to the south 
wall, and here Mrs. Drapeau keeps her wash- 
tub, churn, and milk separator. The place 
is always crowded with lounging men; the 
dogs are everywhere under foot, and the air 




THE DRAPEAUS LIVE ON A LONG PENINSULA 
TO THE WEST OF THIS ISLAND'' 



is thick with the smoke from many old pipes. 
Herring nets hang from the rafters, harness 
on the walls; drying skins are stretched across 
the uprights. In the muskrat season dozens 
of furry, brown rats are nailed, by their tails, 
to the outside walls, and inside the house 



1^6 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

great pails of bloody water, piles of raw skins, 
and heaps of rats fill the small room. 

The Drapeaus believe in the division of 
labor, and the work of the family seems por- 
tioned out in a thoroughly satisfactory way. 
Andy, the eldest son, is the farmer, Lewis the 
hunter and George the fisherman. 

Mrs. Drapeau, though not an old woman, 
goes back to the early days of the settlement 
and know^s all the hardships of pioneer life. 

"I mind the time," she says, "when this land 
was all wilderness and when the bears and the 
wildcats come up to the very door. Once I 
seen four bear start over across the lake from 
Blake's point to your island. They swum 
across the narrows, the old he-bear in the lead, 
the biggest of the young next, then the little 
cub and the mother behind. Me an' the boys 
was in the boat — we had been a berryin' — and 
when the boys seen them bear they went wild. 
They rowed up along the island after them, 
but they couldn't go fast enough with me in 
the boat, so they landed me and rowed along 
to head ofif the bear, an' blest if they didn't 
turn 'em right back along the shore to where I 
was a sittin'. I was right in their tracks. 

" 'You come back here an' git me,' I yelled, 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 157 

*an' don't you do another trick like that agin, 
the longest day you live.' 

"There was I a-hollerin' an' the boys 
a-laughin' an' the bear a comin'. Why, I 
might 'a' been kilt." 

"What became of them?" I asked. 

"The bears? Oh! they got away. What 
with me a-screechin' an' the boys a shootin' 
they was so scared that they climbed off the 
far side of the island, an' the last we saw of 
them they was over to Henderson's Bay, their 
heads just out of water." 

Mrs. Drapeau tells of the day when she and 
her husband came over to their farm in a lit- 
tle flat-bottomed punt, a calf, the beginning 
of their herd, tied foot to foot and bellowing 
in the stern. It was a hard fight to clear the 
land and bring it to some sort of cultivation, 
and in a few years Drapeau was killed in a 
lumber camp, leaving her with four young 
children to feed. She describes the long win- 
ter nights when she spun, carded, and wove 
the cloth that kept their shivering little bodies 
covered against the bitter cold, of the back- 
breaking days in the fields when she hoed the 
potatoes and planted the corn, that there 
might be food for the hungry mouths, and of 



158 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

the long months when she worked at the 
miners' boarding house, cooking and washing 
for a score of men. 

"I never could have done it if it hadn't been 
for my neighbors," she said. "They was 
awful good to me. The men cut my wood 
every winter as come an' ketched me my fish 
until the boys was big enough to work. Eh I 
but I did have the hardest time the year my 
man died. Scarce was he laid in the ground 
when the two biggest boys come back from 
the school at Loon Lake with the smallpox. 
George and Andy had it and they had it fear- 
ful bad. I thought sure the other two would 
have it too. The health doctor come up all 
the way from Queensport an' nailed a notice 
on my door, tellin' the neighbors to keep away, 
and he forbid me to cross the lake, on fifty 
dollars fine. So there I was, the ice just 
breakin' and me shut in with my children that 
was a dyin', as you might say. I didn't want 
to go to no one's house, nor to have them come 
to mine, but I had little or nothin' to eat on 
the place, and I feared lest my children 
should starve. 

"But I done the best I could, and one day, 
when the ice was all broke, I heard Bill 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 159 

Shelly, the frogger, passin' in a boat. I hol- 
lered to him the fix I was in and told him to 
fetch me some goods from the store an' to 
tell my father how we was shut in. Bill 
brung me the goods and we got along some 
way, and when all was over an' the boys was 
well, here comes Robinson, the health doctor, 
to ask how we was all gettin' along. He stood 
off, twenty paces from the door with his white 
handkerchief to his face. I was minded to 
set the dogs on him. 

"'Why don't you come in?' I says, 'All's 
safe now. You needn't to be afraid. You 
shut me in here, with my dyin' children, and 
not you ner no one else come anear me, not 
even to the shore, to ask did I have so much 
as a hundred of flour to keep us alive. How 
did you know we wasn't all starved together? 
Get you off this land,' I says, 'fer you haven't 
got the grace of God in yer heart' He got 
off and I ain't seen him since, but I ain't never 
fergot him." 

All this she tells me, sitting before the fire, 
her gray woolen petticoat turned back over 
her knees, a black three-cornered shawl laid 
over her head and pinned firmly under her 
pointed chin, She was a beauty once. She is 



i6o A WINTER OF CONTENT 

a pretty old woman still, with her flashing 
black eyes and silver hair. Even now, at sixty 
odd, she milks seven cows, makes all the but- 
ter and cheese, cares for the hens, the turkeys 
and the pigs,, works a small garden, cooks for 
the boys, nurses them when they fall ill, and 
finds time to make wonderful patchwork 
quilts. Mrs. Drapeau can tell the names of 
all the quilt patterns known to Canada. 

I love these patchwork quilts. They speak 
of thrift and industry and patience, and of 
the leisure of a life in which small bits of 
cloth are of more value than the time it takes 
to stitch them together. Who in the cities has 
time nowadays to sit and make a patchwork 
quilt? They bring up pictures of bedfuls of 
little children, sleeping snug and warm under 
mother's handiwork, and of contented women 
sewing in the firelight. 

Their names are poetry — woman s poetry. 
The Log Cabin stands for home, the Churn 
Dasher is food, the Maple Leaf means Can- 
ada. The Road to Dublin, and the Irish Chain 
speak of the homesick Irish heart, but I like 
to imagine that the Prairie Rose was named by 
some happy woman who loved the wide and 
blossoming fields of this new land. 



CHAPTER XV 

Good Friday, a heavy fall of snow and win- 
ter come again. The ground is white, the sky 
dull gray, the lake a dark, bluish green flecked 
with windrows of snow. It is more than a 
week since I have walked on the ice. It bids 
fair to be two weeks before I can cross in a 
boat. At this rate the ice will never break — 
I had to chop out the water hole again this 
morning. This waiting for the ice to go out is 
like waiting for a child to be born, and it 
seems almost as solemn. It induces a calm, 
philosophic, not to say fatalistic, viewpoint. 
You can't hurry it, you can't stop it, you can't 
do anything at all about it. You can only wait. 

Again, as in the fall when the ice was form- 
ing, there is that strange blanket of silence over 
the island. There's not a rustle in the dry 
leaves, not a bird's voice, not even the scraping 
of a hanging bough. The ice field is growing 
darker, wetter, and cracking into long lines 
that form geometric figures — squares, trian- 
gles, trapezoids — until the lake's surface 
looks like a gigantic spider's web. For move- 

i6i 



i62 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

ment there is only the water along the shores, 
creeping up over the stones. 

The evening was cold and gray, with a ris- 
ing wind that whistled up the rain. In the 
night came both the former and the latter rains 
and all other rains between; then Easter Day, 
warm and blue and beautiful. As the Easter 
lesson sank into my heart, along with the still 
beauty of sky and sun and waking life, the first 
butterfly, emblem of the resurrection, came 
forth from his winter sleeping place and flut- 
tered to and fro among the yellow tassels of the 
birches. 

The years remaining may be many or few 
for me, but to life's end I shall hope to keep 
some measure of the joy of that one Easter day. 
I pray that I may always remember the tender 
blue of the arching sky, the white of the wisps 
of floating cloud, the gray purple of the spring 
haze lying over the forests; its silence and its 
peace. Looking out over the breaking ice, I 
remembered the story of two boys who lost 
their lives in the lake only last summer. They 
were forlorn little fellows, held in bondage by 
a stupid, tyrannical father. They had never 
seen anything that boys love — neither a circus, 
nor a picture, nor had ever heard a band. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 163 

They had never been allowed to go even to 
Frontenac, the county seat, ten miles away. 
All they knew about was work and heavy 
sleep and now and then a beating. But they 
were boys after all, and one bright day they 
slipped away from the harvest field and went 
to the lake to go afishing. Hearing footsteps 
and fearing their father's anger, they tried to 
escape it. The younger boy jumped into a 
rotting punt at the shore and pushed off on the 
water. The elder hid behind a rock. 

Out on the lake the old punt filled and be- 
gan to sink. The little fellow, seeing that he 
was going down and knowing that he could 
not swim, called out: 

"Good-by, Charley; Good-by, good-by," 
his piping child's voice sang over the water. 

The elder boy heard him and plunged in 
to his aid. Both went down, and when, at 
last, the grappling hooks brought up the 
bodies, the brothers were locked in one an- 
other's arms. 

A commonplace story, isn't it? Such acci- 
dents happen almost every day — somewhere. 
There's nothing at all in it but childish 
joy in freedom, dread of punishment, terror, 
then love and sacrifice, and, crowning all. 



i64 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

heroic death. I think of them not as "saints 
in glory" but as happy youngsters, trudging, 
hand in hand the streets of the Eternal City; 
seeing, hearing, tasting all the joys that life 
denied them here. 

Resigned to the thought of days and weeks 
of solitude, I was surprised by the sound of a 
long halloo coming from the direction of 
Blake's Point. 

It was Henry, standing on the extreme end 
of his land and calling over to me. His was 
the first voice I had heard for days. 

"Come down to your point," he yelled. 

Scrambling through the underbrush, slid- 
ing from rock to rock, plowing through bogs, 
wading through patches of snow, I reached the 
shore, to see Jimmie Dodd, trotting cau- 
tiously across the ice dragging his little hand- 
sled, while Henry directed his way from the 
point. The sled held loaves of bread, a pat of 
fresh butter — a great bag of mail and a box 
of candy and fruit — the Easter greeting from 
home. The water was flowing all round the 
shore; Jimmie could not come within many 
feet of the island, but I waded out on the 
shelving sand and Jimmie crept as near the 
edge of the ice as he dared and tossed the 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 165 

bags to me across the open water. Then he 
trotted back again to the farm and I returned 
to the house to enjoy my feast alone. 

Day followed day, slipping by swiftly, si- 
lently. The first phoebe has come back and is 
twiching his tail and screaming his "Phoebe, 
phoebe, phcebe," all day long. 

Across the sky, in V-shaped wedges, the 
geese are flying over. From ever so far I can 
hear their "honk-honk," telling me why the 
April moon is the Goose moon. 

The woodchuck, that lives in a hole by the 
sundial, comes out and waddles slowly down 
to the lake's edge to dip his black muzzle in the 
water. He turns his rat's face up to the sky, 
glancing hurriedly from side to side, his little 
pig eyes rolling, the white ring of hairs sur- 
rounding his snout standing like a ruff. He is 
so fat that his short legs hardly lift his red- 
brown breast off the ground, and his bushy 
tail drags as he goes. He walks with a roll- 
ing waddle, like a bear. His gray-brown coat 
is dry and dusty. 

There are hundreds of wide-open clam 
shells lying on the sand under the water, pearl 
side up. They are the shape and almost the 
size of the soles of a pair of baby's shoes. 



i66 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

When I turned over the skiff, that has lain on 
the shore all winter, there was a muskrat's 
nest under it. The animal had scooped out a 
hole in the beach, and a pile of clam shells 
showed that he had feasted well. 

But though all these other small animals 
are coming out, I am forlorn, for Peter, the 
rabbit, has disappeared! Up and down the 
island I have gone, calling him, but he does 
not come hopping to my feet. No one will 
acknowledge having shot him; indeed, it 
would be a hard-hearted hunter that would 
kill so gentle and so trusting a creature. So 
either the hounds got him or he felt the call 
of the spring and wandered away to the woods 
full of fresh green. I prefer to think he did 
that, but I miss him cruelly. 

Here, as in Kipling's Jungle, spring is the 
time of new smells. All winter there were 
some good smells — the odor of far-off forest 
fires; the fragrance of fresh-cut logs; the not 
unpleasing, pungent scent of Blake's cow 
stable, that came over the ice to me on the 
crisp, frosty air, but now there is a very riot of 
perfume. The rotting leaves, the barks of 
trees, the swamps and even the rocks them- 
selves, give forth an incense. The poplars 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 167 

and the birches shake out sweetness from their 
waving tassels, the new green fringes of the 
evergreens are fragrant, soon will come the 
odors from wild cherry, basswood, and wild 
grape in flower, and the scents of the new 
ferns, and then I shall go quite wild with de- 
light and shall long to shout my joy to heaven, 
as Rufus, the red squirrel, is doing now. Far 
out on a birch limb, in the sun, he is cluck- 
ing and chirping away, his plumy tail waving, 
his whole little tense, rust-colored body jerk- 
ing as he gives tongue to his spring ecstasy. 

Rufus is not always so harmlessly employed. 
He and the phoebes wage perpetual war over 
a nestful of eggs under the eaves. One or 
other of the small householders must stand 
ever on guard against the red robber that goes 
like a flash along the beam. What fluttering 
of wings, what scampering of tiny feet, what 
chattering there is! But the birds will win, 
they put the squirrel to flight every time. 

Once again I heard a call from Blake's 
point. This time it was Mary, out looking 
for new-born lambs. Her voice, borne on the 
wet wind, came clear over the water between 
us: 

"How are you getting along?" 



i68 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

"Oh, not too bad," I shouted in the ver- 
nacular. 

"We think the ice will go out this week." 

"Never," I screamed. "At this rate it will 
last until June." 

"Well, I don't think it. We tried to get 
over to Jackson's yesterday, and the middle 
of the lake was opening so fast we could not 
make it." 

"I'll go to the shore every day at noon, and 
let you see that I am alive," I promised. 

"All right," she answered. "Hang out a 
white cloth if there's anything really wrong, 
and we'll try to get over to you somehow." 

And away went Mary, a lamb in her arms, 
the ewe bleating at her heels. 

Then came a day of warm rain, followed by 
a high wind from the south, that drove the 
breaking ice before it and piled great masses 
of glistening white fragments on all the 
beaches. And, sure enough, on the next Sun- 
day, the eleventh, Henry Blake and Jimmie 
Dodd came across in a boat, the first I had 
seen in the water for four months. 

That morning, when I looked out, instead 
of the solid floor of ice that I had seen so long, 
there was a great stretch of dark and tumbling 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 169 

water, over which two white gulls wheeled 
and dipped. For an instant I was startled. 
I felt as though the island had somehow 
slipped its moorings and was being washed 
away. Then I realized that the ice was gone 
and, so far as I am concerned, gone forever, 
and that the winter, with its bitter nights, its 
long quiet days, its flash of sunlight on silver 
surfaces, became as the memory of a dream. 



CHAPTER XVI 

What is the first wild flower of the spring? 
Each of us has his own first flower. It varies 
with the locality and the special season. Here 
it was the hepatica, that lifted its little faintly 
blushing face from the edge of a patch of 
melting snow. I plucked it, remembering the 
words of Old Kate, at Les Rapides: "Ef you 
pluck yer first flower and kill yer first snake, 
you'll prevail over yer enemies for the comin' 
year." 

I did not trouble her poor mind by inquir- 
ing: "What if your enemy is also plucking his 
first flower and killing his first snake. Who, 
then, would prevail?" 

I know of no enemy, but I gathered the 
hepatica. Whether I shall kill the snake re- 
mains a matter of doubt. If it is old Jose- 
phine, who will soon be sunning herself on a 
flat rock at the bathing beach, I will not. That 
snake has been a friend of mine too long. 

After the hepatica came the dicentra cucu- 
laria, or Dutchman's breeches — a wide patch 
of them, nodding from a shaded ledge of 
rock, and then the trillium, lifting its white 

170 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 171 

chalices by thousands through the woods. If 
Saint Patrick had known the trillium, I can- 
not think that he would ever have chosen the 
shamrock as his emblem of the Trinity. The 
golden-throated flower rises three-petaled 
from a cup of three green sepals. Below this 
is an inch or so of thick, green stem and below 
that the leaves, three in a whorl. So three and 
three and three says the plant with every part 
of its being. 

The air is full of the spring songs of birds 
and the dry whir of innumerable wings. A 
colony of gold finches moved in last night, 
and they are singing like hundreds of canaries 
in the cedars. "Konker-ree," call the red- 
wings over in the meadow. "Purity-purity," 
sings the bluebird, and "Quick-quick-quick," 
snaps the flicker. Busy brown sparrows slip 
through the dry leaves. On an oak tree the 
woodpecker is playing his xylophone, sound- 
ing a different note on each branch that he 
strikes with his little red hammer. 

From the drowned lands come the boom of 
the frogs and the rattling signal of the king- 
fisher, and to-day — the seventeenth of April 
— I heard the first call of the returning loons. 
The water is very still, with schools of pin- 



172 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

long striped fishes swimming in the sunny 
shallows. 

The leaves came out in a night. One eve- 
ning there was only a purple haze over the bare 
twigs, and the next day the swollen buds had 
burst out into a very vehemence of leafage, 
and all the woods were green. The fields on 
the mainland also turned green that day, and 
on the island the wild cherry blossoms opened 
in drifts of white, that loaded all the branches. 

With all this newness out of doors, the 
thought of fresh foods possessed me and I 
started forth on a foraging expedition, to find 
out whether the hens had waked to their 
duty, and whether the cows were ready to give 
milk again. Verily I was aweary of tinned 
milk, stored eggs, and packed foods of all 
varieties. So I took the skiff and started for 
the Jacksons'. 

The Jackson farmhouse stands on a high 
hill, commanding the lake. From her kitchen 
door Anna Jackson can see every boat that 
passes. Therefore, long before one comes to 
shore, she is ready, wearing a frilled tea apron 
and a welcoming smile, when the panting vis- 
itor comes toiling up the steep slope from the 
landing. To-day the winds were contrary 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 173 

and I took her unaware, by creeping along the 
shore in the lee, and Anna, in her work 
dress, was digging stones out of the garden. 

Grandma Jackson was knitting beside the 
stove in the sunny kitchen. A peddler, a low 
voiced, dark-eyed young Jew, sat in the cor- 
ner. At my entrance he began unpacking his 
big oilcloth-covered case, drawing out aprons, 
handkerchiefs, shirtwaists, stockings, until 
the floor was strewn with its contents. Every 
article that one could name seemed stowed 
away in that great pack — enough to have 
stocked a small department store. When all 
had been displayed he began putting them 
away again. 

"That's all what I got," he said with a pa- 
tient smile. Presently he shouldered his load 
and walked away, bending under its weight. 
We heard him coughing as he passed through 
the gate. 

These peddlers begin their travels with the 
spring, being heralded by the telephones all 
along the line. It seems impossible that they 
should make a living, but I suppose they do, 
for, after being shut in for a long winter, few 
women can resist buying a ribbon or some lace 
when it is brought to the very door. 



174 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

"That feller won't sleep at Joshua White's 
to-night," quoth Grandma Jackson, watching 
the stooping figure out of sight. "All tramps 
and peddlers and such like always put up at 
Joshua's. He'd give them all a supper and a 
bed." 

But Joshua White died yesterday, and his 
house was the "wake house" now, for they 
still have wakes in this country — when the 
neighbors gather to condole with the be- 
reaved, extol the virtues of the deceased, and 
partake of supper at midnight, when the 
whisky and the clay pipes are passed around. 
In this case there would be no difficulty about 
praising the dead man. Joshua White was a 
man of good standing, and wide charity, a 
good neighbor and a kind friend. The com- 
munity mourned his loss. 

"Joshua was an awful proud man too," 
said Grandma. "Do you think that he would 
ever carry a handkehchief with a colored 
border? Well, I guess not." 

At that moment the telephone bell rang. 

"Gran," said Anna, after a moment's con- 
versation, "Mary wants to know the age of 
Alec's eldest boy. Can you tell her?" 

"I dunno," answered Mrs. Jackson. "Let 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 175 

me see. No, I can't remember. Ask Mary 
haven't they got some old horse or cow that 
they can reckon by? There's always some old 
critter on every farm that they counts the 
young ones' ages by. Alec's Charley was born 
the spring they bought old Nance. They must 
know how old she is." 

Just then the three Jackson children came 
in from school, with their bags of books and 
little tin dinner pails. There was no running 
or shouting; they sat down quietly at table. 
Six-year-old Beryl's small face was pale and 
grave. She had started that morning at seven 
o'clock, had walked four miles to school, had 
sat all day on a hard bench with her little feet 
dangling. At noon she had eaten her dinner 
of cold potatoes, "bread and jell," cake and 
pie, and at four o'clock she had started home 
again, trudging those four long, muddy miles 
to a put-away supper. No wonder she looked 
subdued. She was tired in mind and in her 
frail, small body, but she is getting an educa- 
tion. Beryl is at the head of her class. She 
tells you this with a little grown-up air. 

It seems a topsy-turvey thing, this way of 
keeping schools open during the winter, when 
only the children living close to the school- 



176 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

houses can reach them through the snowdrifts 
and the mud, and closing them in summer 
when the roads are good. I should turn things 
the other way round, and give the long holi- 
day in winter; but I am told that my plan 
would never do. The farmers need the chil- 
dren. So in the rural districts the weeks spent 
at lessons are few. It is only in the spring and 
fall that the children can go to school and 
there is no such thing as ''regular attendance," 
that bugbear of public instruction. 

After all, I fancy that the youngsters learn 
as much while they toss the hay in the clean, 
hot meadows, or when they drive the cattle 
along the shady roads to the lakes, as they 
would if penned in the little one-room houses, 
where some eighteen-year-old girl, just from 
high school, struggles with the work of all 
the grades at once. 

This thing of getting an education is a 
mighty matter in Canada. The roads are 
dotted with schoolhouses, the papers have 
long columns of advertisements for teachers, 
and it is always specified as to whether Cath- 
olic or Protestant is needed. It seems the dear 
ambition of each family to produce at least 
one teacher, and the Normal School at 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 177 

Queensport turns them out by the score. On 
Monday mornings and Friday afternoons ve- 
hicles of every description travel to and from 
town, taking the girls home for Sundays and 
back for the week's work. 

Students hire a room in Queensport for two 
dollars a month, and with it goes the privilege 
of cooking on the family stove and sitting in 
a warm room to study. Those who live near 
enough to town bring their food from home, 
so food costs them nothing. Thus they work 
their difficult way through to the little coun- 
try schools. 

My neighbor, Mrs. Spellman, is doubly 
proud, for her two daughters are teaching, 
one in Alberta, the other in far-away British 
Columbia. 

"It was hard work to give them their train- 
ing," she says. "Their father had no patience 
with the notion of sending them to high 
school, so he wouldn't help. But I made up 
my mind that they should have their chance. 
They'd not be tied down to a farm all their 
days, as I've been. Mary, my eldest, was al- 
ways such a home girl too. She wouldn't 
hear of leaving me until I promised that she 
should come home every week. There wasn't 



178 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

anyone to drive her to town and back but me, 
but I seen to it that she got home. Every Fri- 
day noon I'd harness up and go for her, com- 
ing back long after dark. Every Monday 
morning I'd be up before day, to feed the 
horse and cook breakfast in time to take her 
back to school again, and she never was late. 
I always had her there by nine o'clock. Some- 
times the roads were so dark that I'd drive all 
the way with the reins in my two hands. I 
was afraid to hold them in the one hand lest 
I should get them crossed in the darkness and 
pull the horse out of the road and into the 
drifts. I'd feel sometimes as though my hands 
was frozen. But I never missed a week all 
those two long years. When Nellie, my sec- 
ond girl, went, it wasn't so hard for me. The 
two stayed in Queensport together, and they 
didn't get so homesick. Yes, it was a hard 
pull, but I'd do it all over again, for my chil- 
dren did well. They stood at the head of their 
class. I'm proud of them when they come 
home, summers." 

I have often wondered at these little school- 
ma'ams, with their youth, their high spirits, 
and their wholly innocent love of pretty 
clothes and beaux and good times. They have 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 179 

to board at one house and another, accustom- 
ing themselves to all sorts of food, all kinds of 
families. They must toil through rough 
weather to their work. They must learn to 
please all parents, to conciliate school boards 
and supervisors. They must have sense to 
steer a difficult way through neighborhood 
prejudice and to avoid giving rise to gossip. 
A task for a strong woman, it has always 
seemed to me, but I wonder no longer that so 
many succeed in it, since I know something of 
the strength of the mothers who stand behind 
them. 



CHAPTER XVII 

The mudcat season has come. After the 
winter's diet of salt herring, and before the 
open season for bass and pickerel, comes the 
mudcat, alias bullhead, to give us the taste 
of fresh fish again. From April fifteenth un- 
til the fifteenth of May is the closed season 
for pickerel, and from April fifteenth to June 
fifteenth it is forbidden to fish for bass, so now 
the humble mudcat comes to his own. 

Over on the Drapeaus' shore the men are 
all skinning bullheads for market. They 
have rigged up a machine that twists ofif the 
heads and strips off the skins at one turn of 
a handle. Andy Drapeau dips the fish out of 
the live box. Black Jack skins and beheads 
them, George Drapeau rakes away the offal, 
Harry Spriggins and Lewis Drapeau pack 
the fish in barrels. The whole shore reeks of 
them, the beach is red with their gore, for 
your bullhead is a very bloody fish. He is an 
ugly creature — great head, thorny spines, 
wicked-looking mouth, but he tastes very good 
indeed, if one has not seen Black Jack skin 
him. 

1 80 



A WINTER OF CONTENT i8i 

I have come in for the usual present, and 
have to restrain my friends, or they would 
give me at least a half barrel. 

"Kin you git their inside out, ef I take the 
hide off en them?" asks Black Jack. And I 
assure him that for the sake of fresh fish I 
can do anything. 

John Beaulac was not there. The Beaulac 
baby — my godson — was "awful sick." 

Later in the day came young Louis to the 
island to ask for the loan of some alcohol. 
The doctor had seen the child, by chance, as 
he was passing through the farm on his way 
to the lake, and had prescribed a warm bath 
and an alcohol rub. Young Louis' eyes were 
big with horror. To wash a sick child was 
evidently the same thing as killing it out- 
right. I supplied the alcohol and, gathering 
up clean sheets, soft towels, a new washcloth 
and talcum powder, took shipping for Loon 
Lake. 

Rose Beaulac sat in the center of a red-hot 
room, the window shut, the door shut, every 
chair, box and square foot of floor space oc- 
cupied by a child or a dog, and held the gasp- 
ing, moaning baby, despair in her face. One 
look at its crimson cheeks and glazed blue 



1 82 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

eyes told me that it was an ill child indeed. 
My thermometer showed a temperature of a 
hundred and four when it came out from the 
burning little armpit. 

John stood beside the woodpile and called 
me as I left the house. 

"Was the baby very ill? Ought he to send 
for the doctor?" 

It was "Yes" to both questions. 

Then John did some figuring in his mind. 
His beady black eyes stopped twinkling, his 
face grew stern and set. This has been a hard 
winter for Jack. The war stopped the export 
of mica and the mines have been shut down. 
Last year was a wet season when the hay 
floated in the meadows and the grain sprouted 
in the stooks. It has been almost impossible 
to make ends meet, but if the child needed the 
doctor — well, he must be called and he'd be 
paid somehow. John left the decision to me. 
I must call the doctor if I thought best. 

So away up the lake, three miles to the tele- 
phone, I rowed, and the doctor promised to 
come the next day. 

"Tell John to have a boat at Henderson's 
landing for me, at seven-thirty. I can't make 
the fifteen miles there and back over these 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 183 

roads to-night. Meanwhile keep up the bath- 
ing and the alcohol rubs, and tell Rose to keep 
that door open. Don't forget that. Tell her 
that child must have plenty of air" — an in- 
junction that Dr. LeBaron did not in the least 
expect to have obeyed when he gave it ; it was 
merely a part of his general course of educa- 
tion. 

How did those eight people manage to 
breathe in that stifling room; how could that 
ill child survive in that foul atmosphere? I 
wondered, as I laid my weary body down on 
my clean, cool bed. And if I were worn out, 
what must Rose be, who had sat for three 
nights with that tossing, suffering baby in her 
arms? 

Whether the lake is more beautiful in the 
early morning or at sunset, I have never been 
able to determine. At six o'clock, as I pushed 
off from the dock on the blue water, the 
thrasher's liquid song followed the rhythm of 
the oars. Out on the open bay the swallows 
wheeled and dipped all round the boat, so 
near that I could have touched their bur- 
nished blue-green backs. On the beaches the 
sandpipers ran tipping up and down, their 
plaintive piping mingling with the robin's 



i84 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

song. A gentle breeze roughened the water 
and every little ripple that hurried to the 
shore was tipped with a winking star. 

At Beaulac's all was in readiness for the 
doctor. Rose's eyes were glazed with sleep- 
lessness, her face lined with fatigue; but she 
had found strength to comb and braid her 
dark hair, the children's faces had been 
washed, and the baby had been dressed in a 
little new pink cotton frock. There was a 
dishpan full of newly hatched turkeys behind 
the stove, for even if one's child is dying one 
must try to save the fowl, and there was a 
basket of young kittens under the bed. But 
Richard, the pet lamb, had been banished to 
the meadow and the hounds were tied to the 
fence. John had gone for the doctor. Mary 
was alone with the ill child. She had done 
all she could, she could only wait. 

"I'm glad you got me his picture," she said 
with a piteous little smile and looking over at 
a kodak print of the baby that we had taken 
some weeks before. "He's never been no- 
wheres to have his picture took. I guess I'll 
be glad of that one." 

Far out on the shining bay we saw the boat 
returning. There was only one figure in it. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 185 

John was coming back alone. The doctor 
had been stopped by an accident case; he 
could not come until evening. Rose's lips 
trembled, but she made no complaint. What 
was the life of one baby when there were so 
many, so many that needed the doctor? 

Back to the island for my midday meal, 
back to Loon Bay to meet the doctor. This 
time there were two figures black against the 
evening sky. John was rowing with quick 
jerks of the short, straight oars. In the stern 
sat a bulky shape digging away with a paddle. 
Under its weight the upward pointing bow 
waved from side to side. Over the gunwale 
amidship came a steady stream of water. Mrs. 
LeBaron, the doctor's wife, crouched on the 
bottom, was bailing away for life. 

"By gol!" said John, in an aside to me, as 
the party climbed the hill. "By gol! but the 
doctor iss a heavy man. I thought she was 
over two, three times." 

Oh, the method of these country doctors! 
There's no talk of "Call me in the night if the 
change should come." No promise: "I'll see 
you the first thing in the morning." No, Dr. 
LeBaron only gave his verdict. The baby had 
pneumonia. The right lung was suffused. He 



i86 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

was a very ill child, but he might pull through 
— no one could tell. And all the time the doc- 
tor's deft hands were making up powders, 
counting tablets, measuring drops. On every 
package he wrote the day and the hour the 
dose was to be given. He set down the times 
for baths and nourishment, he told us what 
symptoms we might expect. He gave his di- 
rections over and over again, slowly, clearly, 
waiting for a repetition of his words. There 
was no haste, no irritation at our ignorance, 
only infinite care, infinite patience. Then he 
ordered out the children, the young turkeys 
and the cats, shook hands with the mother, 
stepped into the boat and was rowed away. 
If the child lived, we would not need him 
again; if it died, we were to notify him at 
once, and twice a day he wished me to tele- 
phone him the baby's temperature, respira- 
tion, pulse, and a general account of the 
progress of the disease. And then when ex- 
citement was at its height, someone broke my 
thermometer, the only one in miles ; there was 
no more taking of temperatures — and the 
child got well! 

The last time that Dr. LeBaron came to 
Many Islands it was to treat Harry Sprig- 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 187 

gins' boy, who had cleft his kneecap straight 
through with an ax. There was no fire in the 
house. The Doctor had to build one and 
boil a pan clean before he could sterilize his 
instruments. There was no one willing to 
help him give an anaesthetic, so he had to sew 
up that wound while the boy sat and watched 
him do it. 

"How in the world did the child stand it, 
Doctor?" I asked. 

''Well, it was pretty hard on him," an- 
swered the doctor. "I told him that I'd 
thrash him within an inch of his life if he 
moved — it was the only way — and the poor 
kid gritted his teeth and swore like a trooper 
all the time. But the wound healed perfectly, 
almost without a scar, and the joint did not 
stiffen." 

"You would be quite surprised to know how 
little charity work I do," continued the Doc- 
tor, giving me a very direct look from his 
keen, gray eyes. "There are not many bad 
debts on my books. The country people pay 
remarkably well, all things considered." 

A quick little smile flits over Mrs. Le- 
Baron's face at his words. I imagine she could 
tell quite another tale. Doubtless she knows 



i88 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

how much of time and strength and pity is 
given for which no money can ever pay. 

"What do you call charity, Doctor?" 

It is not, of course, charity to charge 
Johnny Bagneau ten dollars for driving 
twenty miles through the blinding snow; to 
sit, through the long night and half the day, 
beside the bed where little John makes his 
delayed entrance into life; to eat a breakfast 
of eggs in the shells and a dinner of potatoes 
in their jackets, and to stand outdoors in the 
bitter cold to eat them, because even the doc- 
tor, inured to filth and foul air, cannot eat in 
that poor room. 

*'No, the Doctor does not work for charity," 
the people tell me. "He gits paid for what he 
does." 

Younger men come from the hospitals of 
Toronto and Montreal and hang out their 
signs in Queensport for awhile. They get a 
percentage of the town cases. They do not 
"go in" for the country practice. 

"They young chaps is all very good when 
there's nawthin' much the matter," says old 
Mrs. Drapeau. "But when it's anything bad 
we wants the old Doctor." 

Yes, that is it. When danger threatens we 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 189 

want the man we know. He has brought us 
into the world, he has stood by us through 
life's trouble. It is he who must sit beside us, 
steadfast amid the gathering shadows, as the 
soul starts forth through the darkness of the 
long trail, to the land where there shall be no 
more night. 

These country doctors! Up and down the 
roads they go, by night and day, through 
storm and fair weather, treating everything, 
operating for anything, nursing, instructing, 
overcoming prejudice, performing miracles 
of healing despite incredible difficulties. To 
meet them is to come face to face with the 
eternal realities. To hear them talk is to lis- 
ten to a tale that cuts down deep into the beat- 
ing heart of life. 



CHAPTER XVIII 

The May woods are full of color; the 
crimson of the young maple sprays, the bronze 
and yellows of the new birch and basswood 
leaves reflecting the tints of autumn. 

The brakes are unclenching their little, 
woolly brown fists, the new ferns are uncurl- 
ing their furry, pale-green spirals. The 
dwarf ginseng's leaves carpet the damp hol- 
lows, from their clusters rise innumerable 
feathery balls of bloom. The little wild gin- 
seng holds its treasure safe — the small, edible 
tuber hidden far underground. There is no 
long-nailed Caliban to dig for it here on the 
island. 

The trillium flowers are turning pink. Af- 
ter about two weeks of snowy whiteness they 
have changed to a beautiful rose color, and 
oh, the perfume that comes blown across those 
far-stretching beds of trillium! No garden 
of summer roses was ever half so sweet. 

On the mainland trail, that winds along the 
shore from Drapeau's to Foret's, the ground 
is blue with violets and yellow with adder's 

190 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 191 

tongue, straw-colored bell wort and the 
downy yellow violet. Wild columbine 
beckons from the rocky crannies, Bishop's 
cap and Solomon's seal wave in the thickets, 
the wet fence corners are gay with the wine- 
red flowers of the wake robin and the tiny 
white stars of the wild strawberry dot the 
meadows. 

This is insect time. The air hums with the 
whirring wings of the May flies, eel flies, 
woolly heads, and the great mosquitoes. They 
cling in clouds on all the window screens, 
they come into the house by hundreds, hang- 
ing on my clothes and tangled in the meshes 
of my hair. The wild cherry trees are fes- 
tooned with the webs of the tent caterpillars 
and the worms are spinning down on long 
threads from thousands of teeming cocoons. 
When I walk through the woods I am deco- 
rated with a pair of little, live epaulets. 

The treetops are noisy with a convention of 
bronzed grackles discussing all sorts of burn- 
ing questions in their harsh, raucous voices. 

"Cheerily, cheerily, cheer-up," begs a robin 
in a white pine. 

"I see you, I see you," warns the meadow 
lark. 



192 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

"We know it, we know it," answer the 
vireos. 

The sapsucker is back, beating a tattoo on 
the house roof. An empty wooden box at the 
door rings like a war drum under the blows 
of his hard bill. On the first morning he 
waked me I felt a sentimental pleasure in the 
sound; it seemed spring's reveille. On three 
successive mornings I heard him with an ever- 
decreasing joy. On the fourth I sprang out 
of bed, dazed with sleep, and, seizing a stick 
from the woodpile, I let fly at that diligent 
fowl, and he dashed away with a squawk. So 
low may one's love of nature ebb at four 
o'clock in the morning. 

To-day, as I was dreaming on the porch, 
I heard a fat-sounding "plop," and saw a yard- 
long snake hanging in a crotch of a poplar, 
twisting his wicked head and lashing his tail. 
Immediately a brilliant redstart flew down 
and began darting at the reptile's eyes, scream- 
ing and fluttering at a great rate. The snake 
had probably gone up the tree for eggs, only 
to be driven down by the small, furious 
householder. In a moment more he slid down 
the trunk and disappeared under the house. 

The snakes on the island are harmless, I am 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 193 

assured. Therefore I do not object to this 
one's living under the porch, but I hope that 
he will stay under it, and that I shall not step 
into the middle of his coils some day when 
he is out sunning himself. The feel of a live 
snake under my foot would throw me back 
some millions of years and I should become, 
at once, the prehistoric female, fleeing in ter- 
ror from the ancient enemy. 

The young rabbits are out, hopping softly 
down all the paths. They look so exactly like 
the small brown plaster bunnies sold in the 
shops at Easter that, when something fright- 
ens them and they "freeze" motionless under 
a bush or fern, I can scarcely believe that 
they are not toys, after all. Comical little 
creatures! They eye me with such solemnity. 
I often wonder what makes babies and other 
young things look so very wise. They seem to 
know such weighty secrets, that all the rest of 
the world has long forgotten. 

The old hares also are coming round the 
house again. One ventures so near and drives 
the others away so fiercely that I half believe 
he is little Peter returned to me. 

Over at the farms the spring sowing is 
done — the wheat, the barley, and the oats ; and 



194 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

in the long twilights, and under the Planter's 
Moon, the farmers are putting in the last seed 
potatoes. Seed planted at the full of the May 
moon gives the heaviest crops, they say. 

In the furrows, the big dew worms are 
working up out of the wet ground, to be bait 
for the fish hooks. Here, our object in fish- 
ing being to catch the fish, we use worms, 
frogs, anything that fish will bite, leaving 
flies, spoons, and sportsman devices to the 
campers who fish according to science and 
rule. 

Walking along the shore trail yesterday, I 
came upon Black Jack Beaulac, sitting on a 
rock, fishing tackle beside him. He seemed 
deep in thought and I wondered what new 
deviltry he was hatching there, for Black 
Jack is the tease and torment of the country- 
side. It is he who starts the good stories that 
go the rounds of the stores and firesides, and 
the slower wits fly before his tongue like chaff 
before the fan. 

If Black Jack's tales on the other men are 
good, theirs of his performances are quite as 
well worth hearing. There is one of the time 
when he stole a hogshead of good liquor, and 
carried it off single-handed before the won- 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 195 

dering eyes of the "Sports" encamped at Les 
Rapides. It was Black Jack who plunged 
into the icy waters of the lake to the rescue of 
the halfbreed drowning there, and it was he 
who came to the aid of poor, terrified Re- 
becca North, whose husband had gone sud- 
denly deranged and was running amuck. The 
poor crazy giant has never forgotten the treat- 
ment he received at those great hands. Long 
after his madness was past he spoke with awe 
of Black Jack's powerful grasp. 

Again there is the story of the race on the 
ice of Henderson's Bay that will never lose its 
flavor. I heard it from Uncle Dan Cassidy 
one wet Sunday afternoon, as we sat round 
the Blakes' kitchen fire popping corn and cap- 
ping stories. Uncle Dan has a brogue as thick 
as cream and a voice as smooth as butter. No 
writer of dialects could ever reproduce his 
speech. Translated, the tale runs thus: 

There was to be a great race to which any- 
one having a horse was welcome. Yankee Jim 
Branch, a cousin of Black Jack's, had an old 
nag, fit for little, which he entered by way of 
a joke. Black Jack, being temporarily out of 
horses, in consequence of some dealing with 
the local storekeeper and a chattel mortgage. 



196 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

was not included in the company. There had 
long been a feud between Black Jack and 
Yankee, so it was considered a good thing that 
they were not both to be represented in the 
contest. 

It was a great occasion. The course was 
staked out on the ice with ceremony, little 
cedar bushes were stuck up to mark the quar- 
ter miles, and there was a flag at the judge's 
stand. William Foret held Joe Bogg's big 
silver stop watch to mark the time, Andy Dra- 
preau had a stump of pencil and an old en- 
velope on which to record it and the stakes 
were as much as two dollars. 

The start was made, all horses had run, and 
the race, oddly enough, lay between Bogg's 
gray and Yankee's old hack, when — 

"Ping!" 

A shot sang out from somewhere, far back 
on the point, and Yankee's horse dropped like 
a stone. His driver was leaning far out over 
the wretched creature's back, belaboring him 
with a great gad. The halt was so sudden 
that away he went, straight on over the horse's 
head, landing hard on the ice. Up he jumped 
raging, and ran back to the stupified group at 
the stand. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 197 

"Is any man in the crowd got his gun?" he 
demanded. 

Every man was abundantly able to prove 
that his gun rested behind the door of his own 
cabin. 

"Is Black Jack in the crowd?" inquired 
Yankee. 

He was not, and Yankee was immediately 
convinced that his cousin, Black Jack, had 
fired that shot. 

Then in the midst of the excitement Black 
Jack himself appeared, striding unconcern- 
edly down the hill. He had been hidden 
among the bushes, far back on the point, and, 
unable to endure the thought of Yankee's 
bragging if his horse should win, had raised 
his gun and shot the wretched animal, at the 
very instant of victory, and when, in Yankee's 
mind, the two dollars was as good as spent. 

History does not tell what Yankee did to 
get even. Probably nothing, for no one in the 
countryside cares to interfere with Black 
Jack. He is known as a man of his hands and 
a good person to let alone. 

All this and more I remembered when I 
saw Jack sitting on the shore. But he was 
not wearing his usual devil-may-care swagger 



198 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

and cheerful grin. Instead, his square, dark 
face was grim, his great shoulders were bent, 
his long arms hung relaxed and his black eyes 
gazed moodily over the water. He looked 
tired and gaunt and gray. Presently he rose 
heavily and, without seeing me, strode off to 
his boat, stepped in and rowed away and the 
next I heard of him, he had enlisted and was 
off to Valcartier to learn to be a soldier. 

Following his example went Little John 
Beaulac and his son Louis, to the despair of 
poor Rose, and later, Charley McDougal and 
George Drapeau. 

"It's the meal ticket with those fellows," 
commented Henry Blake. ''What do they 
know about this war? They don't even know 
what they'll be fighting for. No, it's the 
money they're after. The mines are not work- 
ing, there's little or no wood-cutting to be 
done, and they're up against it for food. Jack 
thinks that he'll get a pension for his woman 
and a bounty for each one of the kids. The 
recruiting sergeants get so much a head for 
every man they bring in and so, of course, they 
promise these poor fellows anything. But 
they find out different after they've enlisted. 
Black Jack'U never stick at it He'll desert. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 199 

and if he does they'll never catch him. He's 
here to-day and fifty miles away across the 
hills to-morrow. He travels like a mink, 
Black Jack does." 

Poor Jack! He will find the restraint of 
barracks and drill intolerable, he who has 
never known any law but his own will. Will 
he stand the life? I wonder. 



CHAPTER XIX 

November's moon is said to be the Indian's 
Moon of Magic, but here the June moon is 
the wonder moon and "the moon of my de- 
light." It sails resplendent in a luminous sky, 
pouring its brightness down on a lake that 
gleams like a silver shield. Its beams rain 
down through the leaves in a drenching flood 
of light, to lie in shining pools on the mossy 
ground. It illuminates the hidden nooks of 
the forest, it makes the stems of the birches 
look like slender columns of white marble, 
and the woods are so bright that half the 
flowers forget to shut their eyes, and stay wide 
open through the night. Slender, tall irises 
stand like ghost flowers in the swamps; the 
thousand little bells of the false lily of the 
valley — the Canada May Flower — swing in 
the breezes that run along the ground, and on 
the low, south point of the island the rushes 
rattle stiffly and bow their heads as the wind 
passes over them. They are the Equisetum, 
the Horsetail rush, known to the Pilgrim 
housewives as scouring rushes, with which 
they used to clean their pots and pans. 

200 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 201 

Mary Blake tells me that she has used them 
and that the flinty, hollow stems are excel- 
lent kettle cleaners. They do not suggest any- 
thing so prosaic here in the white moonlight 
— rather they make me think of small silver 
spears held upright in the hands of a fairy 
troop, the small, green yeomen of the forest, 
on guard through the white night. 

There is great rushing and scurrying in the 
underbrush, for the deer mice, the rabbits, and 
other small folk of the forest are awake and 
active. The birds too are wakeful and chirp 
answers chirp from one nest to another all 
through the night. 

This is going to be a good bird year judg- 
ing from the number of broken egg shells — 
blue, cream, speckled — that are cast from the 
nests to the ground. There is a continuous 
sound of faint, wheezing cries, the voices of 
nestlings, begging for food. 

A pair of robins have plastered their mud 
nest on a beam of the porch roof, a red-eyed 
vireo has hung her birch bark cradle in a low 
bush under the kitchen window, some phoebes 
have built on the lintel of the house door. It 
seems impossible that so small a nest can hold 
so many squirming little bodies as must belong 



202 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

to all those upstretched, gaping yellow bills. 
The parent phoebes do not hesitate about tell- 
ing me in good round terms just what they 
think of me when I go too near their home, 
but the robins do not scold me, they only go 
off to a bush and mourn. The vireo cares not 
at all for anybody, but sits tranquil on her eggs 
and eyes me fearlessly. 

I have seen a whippoorwill's nest, a thing, 
I am told, that few people ever find. It lies 
on the ground under the shelter of cedar poles 
that serves John Beaulac for a wagon shed, 
and is so directly in the path of the horses' 
hoofs that I wonder it has not been trampled 
into the mold. John's small daughter, Sallie 
May, led me to it, and, as we approached, a 
dark, slenderly trailing bird slid away 
through the underbrush, leaving her two 
furry balls of nestlings rolling helplessly on 
the dry leaves of their bed. They were about 
half the size of young chickens and were cov- 
ered with thick down of a red clay color that 
had so fiery and vital a glow that it made me 
think of live coals showing through the ashes. 
We took one look and hurried away lest the 
whippoorwill mother should become fright- 
ened and forsake her nest, and two sweet and 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 203 

plaintive bird voices be lost from the eve- 
ning chorus. 

At Beaulac's, where I stopped on the home- 
ward way, a lively discussion was going for- 
ward. The Bishop of Ontario was coming to 
Sark, for the first time in many years, to hold 
service and to confirm, and there was much 
speculation about who would join the English 
Church. 

"I'm a goin' to be a Catholic," announced 
poor Ishmael, the half-wit, peering out from 
a dim nook behind the stove. 

"They tells me the priest kin cure the fits," 
he went on, hopefully, "but he won't do it fer 
you lessen you bees a Catholic, so I'm a goin' 
to jine his church." 

"I favors the Baptists, ef I favors any," ob- 
served Bill Shelly, the frogger. 

Whereupon John Beaulac retorted cruelly, 
that "We'd ought to send fer the preacher 
quick and have Bill dipped right ofif the 
dock, clothes and all," further explaining that 
the suggestion was made in view of Bill's gen- 
eral appearance and his boast that he had not 
touched water since early in the previous sum- 
mer, and then only because he had "fell in." 

Bill, so far from being oflfended, took this 



204 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

witticism in excellent part, joining uproari- 
ously in the laugh that followed it. 

For the rest of that week, telephones were 
busy calling a congregation. I was invited to 
drive to church in Mrs. Swanson's spring 
wagon, and reached her farm by a devious 
route on the great day. I rowed across the 
half mile that lies between the island and the 
nearest point of mainland and walked the 
wood trail from Drapeau's to Foret's. There 
William's motor boat was waiting to ferry me 
across the lake and up Blue Bay to the Swan- 
sons' landing. 

Here also there was a flutter of excitement, 
for Susie Dove was going to be confirmed. 

Clarence Nutting too had wished to be of 
the class, but at the last moment it had been 
remembered that he had never been baptized. 
As baptism must precede confirmation the 
Rector, amid the hurry and work of enter- 
taining the Bishop and conveying him to and 
from the several churches where there were 
to be services, had been diligently striving to 
come up with Clarence to baptize him. 

But each time he searched for him Clar- 
ence was away, either in a distant field or over 
in the next township, and so the Rector never 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 205 

caught him, and when the service commenced 
poor Clarence sat humbly at the side of the 
church with the men, and could not come for- 
ward. 

There was no trouble about little Susie. 
Her case was entirely clear. Her new dress 
and white veil were spread forth on the spare 
room bed for display and admiration ; her hair 
was plaited in innumerable tight pigtails as a 
prelude to subsequent frizzes. 

Susie looked quiet and subdued. There 
was a frightened expression in her china-blue 
eyes. She could eat no dinner, she could not 
even taste her pie, and soon she and Mrs. 
Swanson retired to dress. On the way to 
church Susie sat silent, clutching her new 
Prayer Book in a moist and trembling hand. 
On the homeward drive she confided to me 
that she had been very afraid of the Bishop. 

'T knew my Commandments," she assured 
me, "but I was not so certain about the creed, 
and I was afeared lest the Bishop should ask 
me some hard questions." 

Her face then was radiant. The Bishop 
had been kind and had asked no one any hard 
questions, and so this little one had not been 
put to confusion. 



2o6 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

The church at Sark is old and falling to 
pieces but it looked lovely that day. Each 
window sill held a plant in bloom, its tin can 
covered with gay, flowered wall paper — gera- 
niums, fuchsias, patience plants — the orna- 
ments of many a parlor. Each window 
framed a picture of soft, rolling meadows, 
fruit trees in bloom, homesteads nestled in the 
hollows, and, over all, stretches of blue sky, 
flecked with wisps of floating vapor. In the 
center of the church sat the group of ten or a 
dozen candidates for confirmation. Through 
the misty veils their young faces looked out, 
awed and grave and very sweet. There had 
been a great disappointment for little Mary 
Spellman, for her veil had not come from 
town with the rest. She looked like a gentle 
little nun, with a square of plain white muslin 
laid over her flaxen head. Most of these girls 
will not wear bridal dress at their weddings, 
so confirmation is the one great occasion in 
their lives when they can put on the dignity 
and the mystery of the veil. 

^'Defend, O Lord, this thy child with thy 
heavenly grace" — The words seemed to reach 
me from a great way off, repeated each time 
the Bishop laid his hands on a bowed head. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 207 

The Bishop's voice was kind, his tone gentle 
when, his sermon finished, he turned from the 
congregation to deliver his charge to the class. 
I do not remember much of what he said, but 
I have not forgotten his manner. It seemed 
to me, listening, that he must feel a peculiar 
tenderness for these little cut-off country 
parishes. 

After service I was led forward to be pre- 
sented to his Lordship. He said that he had 
heard of "the lady from the Southern States 
who was living alone at Many Islands." I 
could not help feeling that the Episcopal 
eye regarded me with a certain sus- 
picion, as one not quite right in her mind — 
which supposition was, I fear, confirmed by 
my own behavior, for when Mrs. Rector said: 
"My Lord, I wish to present Miss X. to you," 
the unaccustomed sound of the title, and my 
own total ignorance of the proper mode of 
addressing one called "My Lord," gave me a 
foolish, flustered manner that must have be- 
trayed me. 

We locked the silent church, stripped of its 
flowers and white-robed girls, and drove 
along the tree-shaded roads to the shore, 
where the motor boat was waiting. The 



2o8 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

water was so still and so clear that we could 
see every rock and pebble lying a dozen feet 
below. We passed over schools of big fish, 
bass and pickerel, hanging suspended in a 
crystal medium. Between the sheer walls of 
the Loon Lake Portage the sun was going 
down in a lake of gold and the rocks were pur- 
ple and red in its glow. 

I walked the home trail slowly, lingering 
in the falling dusk. The odors of the cedars, 
hemlocks, and basswoods came to me mingled 
with the wet smell from the bogs and the 
perfume of the tiny twin trumpets of the 
partridge vine, twining the damp moss. I 
came out of the dimness of the woods to the 
path worn along the grass of meadows starred 
all over with myriads of misty little globes, 
the seed heads of the dandelions. I pushed 
the row boat off on the quiet water, and 
drifted while "the moth hour went from the 
fields." The sky was bright with the rising 
moon as I climbed the island path. There 
was great scurrying of rabbits in the under- 
brush and away in the misty thickets the whip- 
poorwills were calling. 



CHAPTER XX 

It is wild strawberry time in lower Can- 
ada. The fields are carpeted with them and 
the fern-covered rocks hold each a little gar- 
den where the red berries hang over the water 
like rubies in a setting of clustered leaves. 
The birds are feasting royally and I walk along 
the edges of the meadows, gathering handfuls 
of the ripe fruit. No one is at home any more. 
When I stop at a house the women have all 
gone a-berrying. Thousands of quarts go off 
to the markets, or are cooked here into jellies 
and jam, for the delicacy of the winter is wild 
strawberry preserve. I had it every time I 
went out to tea. Now they give me straw- 
berry shortcake and, O how good it is! No 
garden fruit can compare, in sweetness or per- 
fume, with the little wild berry of the fields. 

Not all my friends go berrying every day, 
however. Yesterday I was kneeling on the 
dock busy washing my clothes, when a heav- 
ily laden motor boat, with a row boat in tow, 
rounded the point and headed for the island. 
In it were Mary Blake, Mrs. Swanson, Anna 
Jackson, and Jean Foret. Rose Beaulac and 

209 



2IO A WINTER OF CONTENT 

Granny Drapeau sat in the little boat behind 
and all space not filled by women of ample 
build, was piled high with pails and baskets. 

"We've come to spend the day," they hailed 
me. ''Don't get scared, we've brought our 
dinners along." 

"Dinner or no dinner, I am glad to see you," 
I called back, waving an apron in welcome. 

"We knew this would be our last chance to 
have a visit with you before the campers come, 
so we've come to have a picnic." 

Ah! What a happy, friendly day! These 
women — busy heads of households, women of 
afifairs — laid aside their cares, forgot their re- 
sponsibilities and enjoyed their party with the 
simplicity of children. And how good was 
the chicken, brought already cooked in a shin- 
ing pail, and the cakes and pies in the baskets! 
Mrs. Swanson had journeyed in to Sark to buy 
candy, and all that the store there boasted was 
the dear old candy of our childhood, little 
chocolate boys and girls and rabbits, sugar 
hearts with mottoes, jaw-breakers and pep- 
'mint sticks. 

We sat long at the big table on the porch. 
We talked and talked, or, rather, they talked ; 
I listened, marking the shrewdness of their 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 211 

deductions, the keenness of their comment, 
the kindliness of their judgments. I heard all 
about the fine new store at Frontenac and the 
bargains one and another had found. They 
described the magnificence of the yearly cele- 
bration there when the Orangemen walk in 
procession. They told me that this year Joey 
Trueman, the storekeeper, had not scrupled 
to set ofT a whole twenty-three dollars' worth 
of fireworks by way of advertisement. 

We explored the scant five acres of the 
island, peeping in at the doors of the little 
summer sleeping shacks, all swept and fur- 
nished for the campers, and then, in the pleas- 
ant languor of the afternoon, I brought out 
my stack of photographs and told all about 
my homefolk. 

For I too have formed the photo-display- 
ing habit of this neighborhood, a friendly, 
kindly custom that makes one free at once of 
the home and all the family. I have never 
gone visiting here without being at once pre- 
sented with the album. Many a time has my 
hostess hurried in from the kitchen to ask: 
"Has Miss X. seen the pictures yet?" 

Big, unmercifully true-to-life crayon like- 
nesses of grandparents stare down from all 



212 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

the parlor walls — ancestral portraits. There 
are photographs of all the brides and grooms 
and babies, snapshots of sons fighting "some- 
where in France," of daughters gone out to 
make homes of their own on the far-ofif fron- 
tier, and there are the faces of those lying safe 
under the cedars in the little graveyards close 
at home. I have heard the life stories of all, 
and so it seems quite natural for me to hand 
out my pictures too. 

As evening drew on and milking time ap- 
proached, my guests gathered together pails 
and baskets and, as we walked single file along 
the trail to the dock, I tried to say something 
of what lies in my heart about all the kindness 
they had shown me in the year gone by, but 
the lump that rose in my throat choked back 
the words. They climbed into their boats, 
that sank to the gunwales under their weight, 
and I watched them away across the purple 
water. 

My holiday is over. In a very few weeks I 
must go back to the city and take up my work 
— the same, yet never again to be the same. 
Here in the quiet of the woods I am trying to 
take stock of all that this year has done for 
me. 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 213 

It has given me health. I have forgotten 
all about jerking nerves and aching muscles. 
I sleep all night like a stone; I eat plain food 
with relish; I walk and row mile after mile; 
I work rejoicing in my strength and glad to 
be alive. 

There has been also the renewing of my 
mind, for my standards of values are changed. 
Things that once were of supreme importance 
seem now the veriest trifles. Things that once 
I took for granted, believing them the com- 
mon due of mankind — like air and sunshine, 
warm fires and the kind faces of friends — are 
now the most valuable things in the world. 
What I have learned here of the life of birds 
and beasts, of insects and trees are the veriest 
primer facts of science to the naturalist — to 
me they are inestimably precious, the posses- 
sions of my mind, for, like Chicken Little, 
*T saw them with my eyes, and heard them 
with my ears." And I shall carry away a gal- 
lery of mind-pictures to be a solace and re- 
freshment through all the years to come. 

The camp is ready for its owner. I have 
spent many hours in cleaning, arranging, re- 
placing, that she may find all as she left it ten 
months ago. The island lies neat and fair in 



214 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

the sunshine, reminding me of a good child 
that has been washed and dressed and seated 
on the doorstep to wait for company. Never 
have the woods looked so fair to me, or the 
wide lake, where the dragonflies are hawking 
to and fro over the water, so beautiful. 

This is dragonfly season. Millions of them 
are darting through the air — great green 
and brown ones with a wing-spread of three 
to four inches; wee blue ones, like lances of 
sapphire light; little inch-long yellow ones, 
and beautiful, rusty red. 

To-day I spent three hours on the dock 
watching one make that wonderful transition 
from the life amphibious to the life of the air. 
Noon came and went, food was forgotten 
while that miracle unfolded there before my 
very eyes. 

I was tying the boat, when I saw what 
looked like a very large spider, crawling up 
from the water and out on a board. It moved 
with such effort and seemed so weak that I 
was tempted to put it out of its pain. But if 
I have learned nothing else in all these months 
in the woods, I have thoroughly learned to 
keep hands off the processes of nature. Too 
often have I seen my well-meant attempts to 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 215 

help things along end in disaster. So I gave 
the creature another glance and prepared to 
go about my business, when I noticed a slit in 
its humped back, and a head with great, dull 
beads of eyes pushing out through the open- 
ing. Then I sat down to watch, for I real- 
ized that this was birth and not death. 

Very slowly the head emerged and the eyes 
began to glow like lamps of emerald light. 
A shapeless, pulpy body came working out 
and two feeble legs pushed forth and began 
groping for a firm hold. They fastened on 
the board and then, little by little and ever so 
slowly, the whole insect struggled out, and lay 
weak, almost inanimate, beside the empty case 
that had held it prisoner so long. 

Two crumpled lumps on either side began 
to unfurl and show as wings. The long abdo- 
men, curled round and under, like a snail- 
shell, began to uncurl and change to brilliant 
green, while drops of clear moisture gathered 
on its enameled sides and dripped from its tip. 
The transparent membrane of the wings, now 
held stiffly erect, began to show rainbow col- 
ors, as they fanned slowly in the warm air, 
and, at last, nearly three hours after the crea- 
ture had crept out of the water, the great 



2i6 A WINTER OF CONTENT 

dragon-fly stood free, beside its cast-off body 
lying on the dock. And 

"Because the membraned wings, 
So wonderful, so wide, 
So sun-suffused, were things 
Like soul and nought beside." 

Certain stupendous phrases rose in my mind 
and kept sounding through my thoughts. 

"Behold, I show you a mystery. We shall 
not all sleep, but we shall all be changed." 

There it stood, that living jewel, growing 
every moment more strong, more exquisite, 
waiting perhaps for some trumpet call of its 
life. Suddenly it stiffened, the great wings 
shot out horizontally, and with one joyous, 
upward bound, away it flashed, an embodied 
triumph, out across the shining water, straight 
up into the glory of the sun. 

When I came to myself I was standing a 
tiptoe gazing up after it, my breath was com- 
ing in gasps and I heard my own voice say- 
ing: "It is sown in weakness, it is raised in 
power. . . . Thanks be to God, which giveth 
us the victory." 

Then, standing there under those trees, 
clothed in their new green and upspringing 



A WINTER OF CONTENT 217 

to the sky, and beside the lake, where the 
young ferns troop down to the water's edge, 
valiant little armies with banners, there came 
to me one of those strange flashes of under- 
standing, that pierce for an instant the thick 
dullness of our minds, and give us a glimpse 
of the meaning of this life we live in blindness 
here. 

I had seen those woods, all bare and dead, 
rise triumphant in a glorious spring. I had 
seen that lake grow dark and still and lie ice- 
bound through the strange sleep of winter. Its 
water now lay rippling in the sun. 

Since my coming to Many Islands, one year 
ago, the Great War has broken forth, civiliza- 
tion has seemed to die, and the hearts of half 
the world have gone down into a grave. 

But even to me has come the echo of the 
Great Voice that spoke to John, as he stood 
gazing on a new heaven and new earth: 

"I am the beginning and the end," it said. 
"Behold I make all things new." 



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